Technical SEO FAQ · Redirects, Status Codes, Sitemaps & Robots
What happens when canonical tags point to redirected URLs?
This creates an unnecessary signal chain.
Example:
/page-a
canonical → /page-b
/page-b → 301 /page-c
A cleaner architecture is:
/page-a
canonical → /page-c
Canonical references should ideally point directly to the preferred canonical URL.
Validate that the canonical target returns the expected status and is itself indexable.
Related questions
- How do redirect chains affect SEO and crawling?
- How do you handle conflicting canonical signals?
- How do you troubleshoot incorrect canonicalization at scale?
- How would you handle thousands of URLs returning 200 but displaying "not found"?
- How would you identify redirect loops?
- What happens when canonical tags point to 404 pages?
- What is the SEO impact of soft 404s?
- What would you check after a large-scale URL migration?
- When should you use a 301 versus a 302?
Community answers
No community answers yet.
Log in to answer Members can add their own answer and like others.