aakk9999, the moderator at the Google forum at WebmasterWorld spotted that Google’s John Mueller said that Google may display the redirect URL in the search results over the destination URL, when they deem it is appropriate.

What this means is if you are redirecting URL A to URL B, Google may decide to show URL A in the search results over URL B.

It is interesting to note that Webmaster Tools just updated to show the destination URLs in the crawl errors.

Why would Google show the redirected URL over the destination URL in the search results? John said, the redirect URL may be “actually a nicer looking URL or we have more signals pointing to that URL, maybe canonical, maybe a lot of links pointing to that URL.”

Here is the video where John answered this at about 46:37 into the video:

Here is the transcript by aakk9999:

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.