: Will a rel=canonical link pointing to a 301 redirect pass less pagerank than one without a 301? On this official Google page about canonical links it says: Can rel="canonical" be a redirect?

@Angela700

As far as I know, you'll be fine, however, it doesn't make sense that the canonical (read "perfect") URI would be an "invalid" (redirecting) URI. If anything, it should be the opposite, any URI that is slightly invalid (and might generate a redirect) should have the rel="canonical" to indicate the correct (no redirect) path.

As an example, if you have a page under /foo/blah but your system forces a slash at the end of all paths, then you'd redirect to /foo/blah/ and that should be the canonical.

Now, you could write a system where /foo/blah does not redirect, instead you simply tell users and robots that the proper path is /foo/blah/ using the rel="canonical" link. That's where canonical is actually useful. That way Google can register /foo/blah as an equivalent of /foo/blah/ and also not mark those two pages as duplicates.

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