Canonicals pointing at redirects: a 12% self-inflicted miss

Canonicals pointing at redirects: a 12% self-inflicted miss

In 240 audited domains, 12.1% of pages declared a rel=canonical to a URL that itself 301s elsewhere. Google ignores the conflicting signal.

— Pages with canonical→redirect: 12.1% ▓▓░░░░░░░░
— Median such pages/site: 470
— Of those, indexed under wrong URL: 38.0%
— Consolidation loss vs. clean canonical: ↓ 9% in coverage

Failure mode: a canonical was set to the 'pretty' URL, then that URL got redirected in a later release. Now the signal loops.

Fix: canonicals must resolve to a 200 in one hop and match the self-referential URL where possible. Add a crawl test asserting every canonical target returns 200. Cohort lifted correct-URL indexing from 62% to 84% (↑ 22 pts).

So what: a canonical to a redirect is a contradiction Google resolves against you.