Is it bad I have a cluster of canonical urls that 301 re-direct?
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Just went through a migration. We have a group of canonical URLs that are NOT the preferred url, but 301 re-direct to the preferred URL. Does this essentially "break even" and the incorrect canonical URL becomes obsolete? And/or would this be considered potentially bad and confusing for bots?
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Hi Dmitrii,
Thank you! I totally agree. After writing this question out, I knew it would be just as confusing for bots. The request for change has been submitted to my team.
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Messing with canonical is dangerous! This daisy chain in rel=canonical can quick eat your crawling budget and/or deindex important pages. You can see Glenn Gabe articles about them:
http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/dangerous-rel-canonical-problems/
http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/redirects-duplicate-content-seo/In reality such incorrect canonicals confuses bot too much.
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Hi there.
Well, it surely confused me
Yes, it's confusing to bots and seems kinda shady to me. If it's possible, do it straight forward - canonicalize to prefrred url.
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