Bad use of the Rel="canonical" tag

[Jason_342]

Google is currently ranking my category page instead of our homepage for our key term and we would rather have our homepage rank for the term.  Would it be a bad idea to rel="canonical" our category page to our homepage?  Our homepage is optimized to rank for the keyword and has more PR than our category page.  However, I don't really know if this will have negative repercussions.

Thanks,

Jason

[Jinx14678]

It depends on how similar the content is - I am not sure the threshold of content needed for canonical to be taken as a directive (cause I know Matt Cutts says a few differences are ago, but that is not really an answer)

It also depends on if you want your category page to rank for different terms.

I am not sure overall this is something I would do, cause the purpose of canonical is a more efficient way to deal with user necessitated duplicate content, or a precaution against duplicate content, and it seems you are trying to use it to change SERPS.

Although nothing I have said, nor do I have any proof this would bring negative or positive effects, I just personally would not do it.

A 301 is really the only way to safely change rankings, or just take a really hard look at your onpage SEO, as there must be a reason Google is placing that page above your Homepage, so in the longrun that tells me there is something not "optimized" for that keyword on homepage, so if you switch you could loose the ranking all together.

[MikeRoberts]

I would not consider using Canonicals as a means to optimize your rankings in the SERPs. Remember that rel="canonical" is a suggestion, not a directive (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394). Google can choose whether they feel your canonical is relevant to use or if it should be ignored. So adding that canonical from your category page to your home page when they are not similar enough and especially if there are no duplication errors will probably lead to Google choosing not to use the canonical suggestion.

[Brian-H]

Could you add links back to the homepage for the keyword term the category outranks you for. This self cannilbilsation of the keyword could give google a clue on how you see your pages.

I've read that some people have suffered a penalty from sites that rel-can links to one page that are not at all duplicate. I have just inherited an ecommerce site that rel-can almost everything (all the products) to the brand name pages. I undid this and the rankings dropped like a stone so it looks like sometimes you can get away with rel-can no similar content.