Is Canonical Tags a Good Option With 2 Similar Sites?

[Kevin_Hatanian]

I have an existing ecommerce site, on a Yahoo platform. I have recently started a different site on the Magento platform with substantially/almost entirely the same products and categories. For various reasons, I won't be ready to do a 301 redirect to the new domain for about another 8 months.

I have 4 questions:

Is it a good idea to use canonical tags in the meantime?

Is there a way to know if the is cannibalization between the sites? They rank for different keywords.

Will I lose all traffic and rankings for the Yahoo site if I go the canonical route?

If I remove the canonical tags at a later point, will the ranking and traffic of the Yahoo site come back?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

[ViviCa1]

We had this issue with products which we sell on two different websites, that Google would rank one or the other, randomly swapping them out for each other in the rankings. We used cross-domain canonicals to solve this and it has fixed the issue for us, i.e. the website we want to rank now ranks for these products, the other one doesn't.

If you use canonicals, it will most likely mean that only the main page will rank (the canonical URL).