301 or Canonical - Ecommerce Site Question

[CMcMullen]

We are making a change to our Navigation and this includes having to change the URL structure of a few pages of our site.   Due to issues with the CMS (that are out of my control) we are unable to keep the current URL structure of two of our highest ranking pages.   Our site is an E-commerce Site

The Structure is changing from.....

www.domain.com/page/highrankingpage  <----OLD PAGE RANKED WELL

to

www.domain.com/category/highrankingpage   <----NEW PAGE

---

Generally I would have 301 'd this page but I found out that our Tech team added a Canonical to this page instead....(showing the high ranking page to the Search Engines) and on our site the visitors are able to browse the website getting the new page.

BOTH PAGES ARE BASICALLY IDENTICAL (Same Content)

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2288690/how-and-when-to-use-301-redirects-vs-canonical#

Thoughts?

[SylviaH]

If both pages are exactly the same, you should still 301 redirect the page.  There's no point in having two identical pages laying around and it isn't good for the search engines.

The canonical tag is typically used if you need to keep those pages on the site or very similar content is posted in multiple places, then you can direct the search engines to the page you want them to count.