Move to new domain using Canonical Tag

[india-morocco]

At the moment, I am moving from olddomain.com (niche site) to the newdomain.com (multi-niche site).

Due to some reasons, I do not want to use 301 right now and planning to use the canonical pointing to the new domain instead.

Would Google rank the new site instead of the old site? From what I have learnt, the canonical tag lets Google know that which is the main source of the contents.

Thank you very much!

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi India

It is unusual to keep both domains if you really want to move site but yes, you can do cross-site canonicals.

So place ON EVERY page of the old site a canonical to the corresponding page on the new site.

The old site will disappear from SERPS and the new site will appear.

Warning

The problem you will have is that the new site will not inherit any of the backlink equity you have built up on the old site. For that, you will need to do a page by page 301 redirect in htaccess on the old site.

I hope that helps

Regards Nigel

[effectdigital]

This is exactly right and is a great answer. Canonical tags stop content duplication from being a problem and can alleviate content duplication related devaluations (or in extreme cases, penalties)

What canonical tags don't do anywhere near so well (if at all) is transfer SEO authority from one page to another. If OP did what they were suggesting, the risks would be (1) Google interprets the canonical tags wrong (2) Google starts ranking pages on the new site instead of the old pages, but (critically) without any appended backlink equity (3) all rankings are then lost on both sites

I'd be extremely, extremely hesitant to deploy in the OPs specified manner and I think that Nigel is 110% correct here