Canonical redirect?

[mattdinbrooklyn]

Can a canonical URL redirect? I'm doing country specific urls with the www. redirecting to the country (i.e. if you go to www.domain.com you'll redirect to fr.domain.com in france). If the canonical is www. then  all the spiders will go to the correct place but I don't know if search engines recommend against a canonical that redirects.

[DmitriiK]

Hi.

I think you misuse or maybe misunderstand what canonical link is. It's basically to say to search engines that the page, which canonical link is pointing to is the original page for a given content. So, if you have on fr.domain.com canonical link which will point to www.domain.com, it means that you are saying that all content on fr.domain is duplicate (or should not be considered separately) of www.domain.com. This will mean that all the ranking juice from fr will go to www.

I believe what you are looking for are hreflangs, which are for telling search engines which subdomains/domains are for which country.

Hope this helps.