Can anyone help me understand the minefield that is canonical tags and 301 redirects?



The issue I have is I joined a company about 5 months ago who’s website is littered with 301 redirects. When looking in Google Analytics and webmaster tools I am seeing 3 versions of our URL’s being listed. One ending in .aspx, one ending .html and others where there is capitalisation in the URL path. I know Google will not be seeing the 301 redirects as duplicate content but the capitalisation might be causing us to incur duplicate content penalties.



I have researched this and I thought the answer to my problems came in the form of Canonical tags (<link rel=”canonical”/> ) but I have read that if you put this tag on pages effected by 301’s you can find yourself in the deep murky stuff!



Can anyone offer any advice on my predicament?