Does canonical links rank in Google?

[WebRiverGroup]

Our company has many pages that use the canonical tag. Will these pages rank in the search engine or will it pass the strength on to the original page?

[William.Lau]

It will still rank but your original page will be priority. If you don't want those other pages to rank you can noindex or use robots txt.

[WebRiverGroup]

Does a page that use the canonical link give any strength or weight to the main page.

If I have a page that already ranks pretty well and I have a page that is canonical will that help increase the SERP or will the page have little or no impact from the canonical page?

[William.Lau]

I just posted this in another question. It should answer your question.

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For Google's definition of the canonical tag refer below.

http://support.google.com/webmast...

rel=canonical just means that http://www.example.com/widget/searching=page2 - will have a canonical tag to http://www.example.com/widget. That way link juice and indexing will not be split between the duplicate pages. That way the original /widget link is more authoritative.

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It will likely increase SERP because Google will not spread your juice to other deep links. All likes like page2-3-4-5-6-7-8 will all go to page1- which is the original page. Removes duplicate content which can help you too.

[irvingw]

It's not passing strength or passing PR because of the tag, it's just suggesting to Google that you would prefer they rank the canonicalled page instead - which they may or may not decide to do depending on the content on the page and the canonicalled page.

[irvingw]

He is referring to the rel next and prev canonical tags. That tagging is critical for proper indexing of paginating pages.