A 301 redirect to a page with a rel canonical to a page with a 301 question...

[Crunchii]

MOZ registers thousands of DC and Duplicate titles on a Drupal site which has a little strange setup.

Example:

www.1234.com/en-us 301 redirects to www.realsite.com/en-us which has a rel canonical to www.1234.com which 301 redirects to www.realsite.com.

If you're still with me I thank you.
My question is since MOZ registers errors, if indeed the rel canonical isn't recognized due to a 301 redirect?

[Crunchii]

I agree it's a strange setup and also suspected it would be ignored. I appreciate the answers and will see if there is a way to hardcode a way out of it.

[Dr-Pete]

It's really difficult to tell what Google will do in these situations, and it's generally a bad idea to chain redirects and caonicals, but I suspect the canonicals will be ignored. The bigger problem here is that the 301 is basically saying that "realsite.com" is canonical, but then the canonical is saying that "1234.com" is canonical. Even as a human, the logic doesn't make any sense, unless I'm missing something. You may see unpredictable results (and unpredictable is usually bad).

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Phillip,

Check out this great reference by Dr Pete: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

In a nutshell (if I can get my head around it)  rel canonical is 'suggesting' to google which version of a page should be indexed for search purposes while 301 redirects are basically taking you to the canonical version of the page already and therefore is more final in regards both users and bots.

The set up you have (assuming that you want to consolidate 1234.com to realsite.com permanently) has a problem in that you are telling google that realsite.com/en-us has a canonical of 1234.com (which is just a suggestion, not a permanent redirect) and therefore yes the canonical as you say is not being reognised in the way you expect it to be because it is indeed just a suggestion, not a followed link if you see what I mean. I think 301 redirecting the realsite/en-us to realsite.com is the only thing that will be a permanent solution.

Hope I got that right, maybe someone else can chime in....

[Crunchii]

Hi Lynn thank you for your response.

Yes a horrible setup but has something to do with Drupal URL architecture.
In Moz it show's www.realsite.com/en-us and www.realsite.com as the culprits so it seems to ignore the rel cannonical from www.realsite.com/en-us to www.1234.com

I might ask the Moz team if Googlebot treats this the same way.

Again thank you for your answer.

[LynnPatchett]

That is just nasty! Which domain is showing the duplicates? I assume the realsite.com and it is showing duplicates between the / and the /en-us versions? I cannot say if moz is registering the errors in the same way exactly as a search bot would register them, but you are asking for trouble with it.

Can you not simplify the chain? It seems to me that the cross domain canonical is pointless in this case. You have all 1234.com urls 301 to their realsite.com equivalents. OK. If needed canonical the realsite.com/en-us to realsite.com or probably better yet 301 redirect it also. It might need a bit of technical fiddling to get it all set up, but surely there must be a way!