301 canonical'd pages?

[birchlore]

I have an ecommerce site with many different URLs with the same product. Let's say the product is a hat. It's in:

a

a) mysite.com/products/hat

b) mysite.com/collections/head-ware/hat

c) mysite.com/collections/stuff-to-wear-on-your-head/hat

Right now, A is the canonical page for B and C.

I want to clean up my site, so that every product only has ONE unique URL, which is linked to from all the collections. So B and C URL will be broken. Is it necessary that I 301 them if they were already canonical'd?

Based on the number of products I have, I would have to 301 1000+ URLs. I'm just trying to figure out what I need to do to avoid getting penalized.

thanks

[mememax]

Just to have you even more comfortable 404s doesn't hurt your site

[birchlore]

Ok that's exactly what I was wondering. I'm not worried about link juice at all. I'm worried if Google's algorithm will flag me because all of a sudden we have these broken (although canocalized) URLs

[mememax]

If those pages are linked only internally to your website you may not need to put any 301 at all.

301 are useful only, as Federico said, if you want to save part of your external juice. If you have backlinks you want those websites to change those backlinks to the canonical page or if not 301 that page to the new one.

If those pages doesn't have any external backlink pointing to them they shouldn't be ranking at all since they're canonicalized to another one, so you'll just need to avoid internal traffic to them changing your internal structure.

[MichaelYork]

Also you can run URLs B and C through Open Site Explorer to see where they are linked from, go and update those links to the new link and then the 301 redirect is just a safety net for any that have been missed.

[FedeEinhorn]

Yes, you should put a 301 to the new and unique URL, so that if you have any backlinks to those pages you get the link juice anyway. Plus, it will avoid potential 404s.

Hope that helps!