What if you can't navigate naturally to your canonicalized URL?

[AlgoFreaks]

Assume this situation for a second...

Let's say you place a rel= canonical tag on a page and point to the original/authentic URL. Now, let's say that that original/authentic URL is also populated into your XML sitemap...

So, here's my question...

Since you can't actually navigate to that original/authentic URL (it still loads with a 200, it's just not actually linkded to from within the site itself), does that create an issue for search engines?

Last consideration...

The bots can still access those pages via the canonical tag and the XML sitemap, it's just that the user wouldn't be able to access those original/authentic pages in their natural site navigation.

Thanks,

Rodrigo

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, IMO it should be okay. It's like in the regular search and browse session, you might have session-ids or other user-experience related variables encoded in the URLs but to avoid duplicate content issues, you have canonical tags. Therefore all things tracking, the internal navigation links are not consistent with the canonical version of the same URL. Whenever a user land's from SE's, he'll see the canonical URLs, but as he starts clicking on other links, they would not be consistent again with their canonical versions. Again, yes, this should be okay and that's why the canonical tag was created. What would life be without the canonical tag, huh

[AlgoFreaks]

Thanks Nakul, agreed.