Can rel="canonical" refer to another website page?

[h1seo]

I want to republish the post from  another website with their permission and want to abide by Google guidelines. Google guidelines is clear when you are using the same content at different parts of the same site however not when using it on another site in a legitimate way.  Is there some way to use  rel="canonical"  refer to another website page of you are reproducing the content from same page?

[smarties954]

In theory the rel canonical should work if it points to your source's website where the article is found.

But it's odd to do it this way. In other word, you tell google: hey it's not my content, don't look or index this page, go straight to the other website.

Since you are allowed to use the content, can't you add your own comments or illustrate the post(s) so it makes the content unique again? You don't need zillions of changes to keep your content unique even if a good chunck is a copy.

This way you would keep everything in your own website, could be indexed by google and possible found.

[NitinRGoyal]

You can use it. Google supports cross domain rel="canonical" link element.

You can check out the Google official blog for this - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html.

Google content guidelines say "There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. In this case, you can use the rel="canonical" link element to specify the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible."

So you can use it without any harm to your site.