Rel=Canonical=CONFUSED

[Stew222]

Hey,

I am a confused canonical and here's why - please help!

I have a master website called www.1099pro.com and then many other websites that simply duplicate the material on the master site (i.e  www.1099A.com, www.1099T.com, www.1099solution.com, and the list goes on).  These other domains & pages have been around for long enough that they have been able to garner some page authority & domain authority that it makes it worthwhile to redirect them to their corresponding pages on www.1099pro.com.

The problem is two-fold when trying to pass this link-juice:

1. I do not have access to the web-service that hosts the other sites/domains and cannot 301 redirect them
2. The other sites/domains are setup so that whatever changes I make to www.1099pro.com are automatically distributed across all the other sites.  This means that when I put on www.1099pro.com it also shows up on all the other domains.

It is my understanding that having on a site such as www.1099solution.com does not pass any link juice and actually eliminates that page from the search results.  Is there any way that I can pass the link juice?

[MikeRoberts]

The Canonical will basically act like a redirect for bots only (its not really but for this explanation it makes things simpler). So the bot will arrive at 1099solution, see the canonical point to 1099pro, and will pass equity to 1099pro if it deems the canonical relevant. A canonical is a suggestion, not a directive, so there is the chance that they won't honor the tag. Unlike a redirect, Users who go to 1099solution will stay at 1099solution. If the tags are honored, eventually the 1099pro versions of a page will replace 1099solution versions in the SERPs.

[danny.wood]

Mike's response pretty much covers it, I would just add that there shouldn't be any negative effects with having 1099pro.com canon to itself, so don't worry about that.