Canonical

[mrodriguez1440]

I have two identical sites with different urls.  I placed the canonical tag in the 2nd site.  Do I need to make all the internal links in the 2nd site point to the 1st site too?

FIRST SITE:  www.aerlawgroup.com

SECOND SITE:  www.losangelescitycriminaldefenseattorney.com

So should the internal links in www.losangelescitycriminaldefenseattorney.com point to www.aerlgroup.com?  As well as using the canonical tag?  Or does the canonical tag make it irrelevant to point the internal links from the 2nd site to the first?

[AdeLewis]

As long as you have the canonical links on every page of the 2nd site then you don't need to worry about any of the internal links but do you actually need to have the 2nd site? Why not just 301 redirect the 2nd site to the 1st site?

[mrodriguez1440]

Thank you for your feedback.  I really appreciate it.

Honestly, I'm a little confused.  Do I get more SEO boost from using Canonical or from 301 redirect?  Or will the both provide the same SEO boost?

I used the Canonical tag and on Google Webmaster it doubled my indexed pages for the first site.  This "doubling" of my indexed pages appeared to help my Google Rankings for the HIGHLY competitive keywords: "Los Angeles Criminal Defense Attorney".

What do you suggest I do, 301 or canonical, assuming I want to get the biggest SEO boost?

Thanks!

LOS ANGELES CRIMINAL DEFENSE ATTORNEY

[AdeLewis]

Hi.

Using rel=canonical won't give you any long-term SEO boost and neither will using a 301 redirect. Essentially all that the canonical link does is to tell Google that any relevance and authority for the page on the 2nd site should be attributed to the page on the 1st site. The 301 redirect does the same but it tells Google that you have permanently moved that page to the 1st site and it redirects the site visitor to the 1st site.

When you first set-up the canonical link there will be a brief period when Google will have crawlled and indexed the 1st site but it hasn't yet picked up the canonical link on the 2nd site giving you the situation where you have your pages 'double-indexed' or duplicated. This double indexing may give false boost whereby you have two bites of the cherry in the search results, this duplication is bad but it will resolve itself as Google re-crawls the 2nd site.

Have a look at what is happening with the number of pages in the index by running both of these searches through google as search queries:-

site:aerlawgroup.com
site:losangelescitycriminaldefenseattorney.com

You will see that the 2nd site has far fewer pages indexed and the pages that are there will gradually disappear until there are no pages in the index, all authority and relevance will have been passed to the 1st site.

[AymanH]

I agree with Ade, you should more focus on 1 website. Especially if the other one is just for canonical.

You may get two websites for local searchs in some very specific cases.

[josh-riley]

I also agree with Ade - it's not about a boost so much as it is about a better user experience and clarification to the search engines of where to focus.

[Dr-Pete]

I endorsed Ade's answer/comments, but I just want to point out something important that people frequently overlook. While rel=canonical and 301 redirects can have a similar impact on SEO, they're completely different for visitors. If a person comes to Site B and there's a canonical tag, they see Site B. Google credits that page to Site A and Site A shows up in search results. If a person comes to Site B and there's a 301-redirect, they go straight to Site A and never see Site B (done properly). These are two completely different experiences with completely different goals. So, set aside the SEO aspect for a minute and ask what you want to have happen to your customers.

[wpnext]

Wish to the continue the discussion here. Since, its on the same topic.

I have a already established blog which ranks on the 1st to 3rd page the moment I add my content in this particular niche.

I had a website made in the mid 2013. Where I had almost 150+ pages of unique content. But, never ranked for any keywords.

Now, I know that using this content on my new blog will be beneficial. Now, the question is:

1. Should I simply deindex my 2nd OLD website and migrate the content one by one to my new website.

2. Should I add rel=canonical tags and start pointing my new website?

3. Should I simply add 301 redirect for each page and wait for the redirects to get indexed?

Also, once I migrate the content on my new blog. Do you think I will have the advantage of using this content on my blog. Since, the content was already old. And this new blog always has new and fresh content with atleast 1500 words count each page.

[Dr-Pete]

Honestly, it depends a lot on the business case. In many cases, consolidating to one site has advantages, but there was some reason you split the sites, and I don't know that history. So, it can be tough to say whether you should abandon one site.

Certainly, if you do, and if you 301-redirect those pages from the abandoned site (which you should, unless that site was penalized), then that content on the stronger site should do well.