Does it hurt your SEO to have an inaccessible directory in your site structure?

[digitalcrc]

Due to CMS constraints, there may be some nodes in our site tree that are inaccessible and will automatically redirect to their parent folder.

Here's an example: www.site.com/folder1/folder2/content, /folder2 redirects to /folder1. This would only be for the single URL itself, not the subpages (i.e. /folder1/folder2/content and anything below that would be accessible).

Is there any real risk in this approach from a technical SEO perspective? I'm thinking this is likely a non-issue but I'm hoping someone with more experience can confirm.

Another potential option is to have /folder2 accessible (it would be 100% identical to /folder1, long story) and use a canonical tag to point back to /folder1. I'm still waiting to hear if this is possible.

Thanks in advance!

[HiveDigitalInc]

Do you know what the redirect type is (301 or 302)? If it is a 301, I wouldn't worry about it. If it is a 302, I'd try and get that changed. Either way, it is unlikely to make a big impact on your site.

[EricaMcGillivray]

From what I understand, it sounds like your CMS creates a bunch of 404 pages that then auto-bounce back to their parent folder. But that these are phantom pages that don't exist? My recommendation is to use robots.txt to no follow, no index. If they are blank pages, you can also add that to the blank page's meta data. Canonical tags are always a good idea.