title: Can canonical URL redirect to equivalent user-friendly URL without hurting SEO?
body: <p>I'm developing a "article gallery" website system. The articles have assigned a canonical name, but their path (what folder they are in) and name can change.</p>
  
  <p>If you visit a url that ends with the canonical name, you're redirected to the right path where the article currently is. Internally, I use this for stable links between articles, so they work even if the article has moved or renamed.</p>
  
  <p>Examples:</p>
  
  <pre><code>example.com/blah/blah/140913-china
  example.com/140913-china
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Both redirect to:</p>
  
  <pre><code>example.com/journeys/asia/visit-to-china
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If I move the article, the former urls will still work - for this new path:</p>
  
  <pre><code>example.com/my-adventures/china
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That works fine, but I want Google to preserve the pagerank and other things associated with the article, even if it has moved to a different path.</p>
  
  <p>For that purpose, I'd add this to the article page:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;link rel="canonical" href="example.com/140913-china"&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That url will <em>always</em> work and redirect to the article.</p>
  
  <p>But, will Google allow this - redirect on canonical url? If not, how else can I do it?</p>
  
  <p>My only requirement is that the user gets the actual full article path in the url bar - which is needed to properly fetch article-relative resources etc.</p>