Can I set a canonical tag to an anchor link?

[Vizergy]

I have a client who is moving to a one page website design.  So, content from the inner pages is being condensed in to sections on the 'home' page.  There will be a navigation that anchor links to each relevant section.  I am wondering if I should leave the old pages and use rel=canonical to point them to their relevant sections on the new 'home' page rather than 301 them.  Thoughts?

[Bryggselv.no]

I would approach this issue with the following:

• I would strongly advice the client against it. This move will hamper the SEO efforts that they're paying for, and they could easily lose 30-60% of their organic traffic. Can they afford this loss?
• If they still insist on doing this, then I think I would keep the old pages as you described. But then that'll give you duplicate issues etc.

[Vizergy]

Yeah, trust me, I have strongly advised against it.  They don't use us for design, just marketing, and the company they use for design (while, admittedly, very, very good) was almost done with this before we were brought in to the loop about the redesign.  Down the road I hope to convince them to add more pages etc... but for now this is what I have to work with.  I am hoping the rel=canonical will take care of the duplicate content issues while perhaps giving a bit more authority to the content sections of the one page design.  This is something I have not done before, however, and I wanted to bounce it off my peers.  Thank you for the response!  I'll come back and post how it goes in a few months.

[Vizergy]

For anyone who may care - this appears to have worked out really well.  So far way better than expected.  Very competitive market and we are on page 1 for most of our most important phrasing.... cool.

[SEOIntouch]

Hi Billy,

I read through your question and it appears it's been 6 months since this post. I wondered how things were going here?

Did you effectively canonicalize your old pages to your new URLs with Anchor Links?

We may be in the process of doing the same thing so just wanted to ask for an update on your outcome?

Thanks