Google’s John Mueller explained how Google handles redirects within its index. At the 5:30 mark in his November 10th SEO office hours hangout, John said they “put them (the URLs) into a shared cluster that we then use for canonicalization.”

Once they are in this shared cluster, Google goes through the dupe detection process for selecting the canonical. Signals Google uses for that, as we covered before, include not just if there is a redirect but also the “internal links within your your website, external links, sitemap files, other annotations that you have on these pages,” John said. Keep in mind Google does not assign weights to these signals manually, machine learning handles it as Gary Illyes said.

In short, you want to be as clear and consistent as possible with all those signals. This way Google knows which URL you want to be the canonical URL. So if you have a 301 redirect from URL A to URL B, but there is a canonical link back from URL B to URL A, that is not a consistent signal. Things like this happen, and happen a lot on the internet. So Google uses many signals to try to figure out which URL should be the canonical.

An visible issue you may see with redirects and how Google Search Console displays them is “Of course the part that’s also associated with this is in Search Console we show the data by canonical URL. So you will also see that shift in Search Console and it makes tracking a little bit confusing sometimes. So I agree that can be annoying,” John Mueller said. But you should be aware of this.

This is not a ranking issue because one of the URLs will rank – the question is, is the URL you want to rank, ranking in Google or not.

Here is the video embed with the question and answer:

Here is a transcript of the answer John gave, although I didn’t transcribe when he talked about internationalization, so keep listening if you want to hear that part:

Hat tip to Glenn:

Forum discussion at Twitter.