301 Redirect & Canonical Tags

[IMM]

If I have URL A and need to 301 Redirect to URL B but want to have a canonical tag on URL B pointing to URL A Would this be considered cloaking?  My server which runs .net 3.5 does not allow me to do URL re-writes.

[sourabhrana39]

Hello IMM,

When you are doing redirection of URL A to URL B so canonical tag is not very useful. Canonical tag we used so many duplicate pages is created dynamically & you can't all pages to redirect onto one main page.

You know that which page should be redirected then no use of canonical tag of URL A on URL B.

Just put URL B in canonical tag for MAIN PAGE.

[Highland]

Paul is right. Canonical is a hint, not a directive. Google will ignore hints when they don't make sense (i.e. a canonical to a 404).Cloaking is when you feed up one site to googlebot and another to real visitors. It can get you banned from Google's index. Canonicals cannot cloak anything.

[ThompsonPaul]

In this instance, your canonical tag would make no sense, and so search engines would likely just ignore it.

If A were the canonical version, there would be no reason to be redirecting it to B.

I must be missing something here. What exactly is the end goal you're trying to accomplish, IMM?

Paul