Relationship Between Cross-Domain Canonical Versions and Backlinks

[Evan_Wright]

Hi All,

I am looking for some community insight on how backlinks on the different versions of a canonical page are handled for ranking purposes.

Suppose that I have two versions of the same page on two different domains:

1. https://www.mysite.com/tshirts <--Canonical Version

2. https://www.mywebsite.com/tshirts <--Non-Canonical Version that points to page #1

Also consider a third domain that is being linked to from the article. Since it is identical content, both pages contain the same outbound links to this page:

3. https://www.myclothing.com

I am wondering how the backlink authority transfer is handled for page number two. Since it has the canonical tag pointing to page 1, only page 1 should be considered for indexing/ranking purposes as a whole page. However, my question relates to what happens  to backlink flow since both #1 and #2 above contain links to site #3.

In the above example, would both mysite.com and mywebsite.com be passing a backlink to myclothing .com, or would it only be the first domain (www.mysite.com) passing link authority since it is marked as the canonical for ranking purposes.

Thanks for any thoughts!

[Nozzle]

The canonical version of the page is the only one that gets indexed and only an indexed page can pass link authority. In this case, only www.mysite.com would be passing link authority.