Can Googlebots read canonical tags on pages with javascript redirects?

[DA2013]

Hi Moz!

We have old locations pages that we can't redirect to the new ones because they have AJAX. To preserve pagerank, we are putting canonical tags on the old location pages.

Will Googlebots still read these canonical tags if the pages have a javascript redirect?

Thanks for reading!

[Jason_S]

I think that it's generally understood that bots read page code, they don't "do" page code like the browser does, so the canonical is read, regardless of the other code on the page.

This wouldn't be the case for 301's that trigger server side, the bot would then never reach the page to read the canonical.

HTH