Canonical tag question

[seoug_2005]

Suppose a site has two pages ( Page A ) and Page B. Both of them have pagerank, but duplicate content.

The page A is ranked for keyword "seo india" and page B is ranked for keyword "seo services".

If i implement canonical tag on page B, does

1. The pagerank of page B will be transfered to Page A ?

2. Does the site A now ranks for keyword "seo servicies " ( for which Page B was ranking earlier )

[STPseo]

I am not sure if there is just a simple yes or no answer to your questions. It is hard to predict exactly to what the search engines will do and ranking will change.

1. It looks like the answer to this question is Yes. Here is a snippet for a Google Webmaster Blog article.

Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.

2. I can only assume the answer to this question would be yes too. I would assume that since both pages are identical and are on the same domain, page A would now rank the same as page B. It is hard to know for sure though. Sorry I can't be more definitive but Google is a complex animal.

[IPINGlobal54]

I would agree with Stephen on point 1, but would throw the following thoughts in on point 2:

For example:

page A is mysite.com/seo-india

page B is mysite.com/seo-services

I would guess that there would be a minor difference in ranking impact on a couple of counts with respect to what phrase is ranked for in each case - despite having the same content.

Things to consider would be the url itself, the page title, the H1 and the metadescription.

I can't see that using a canon from one page to another will migrate additional ranking terms to the destination page in its own right - if you have links to page B with anchors that reflect the terms it might - but how long you would continue to rank for the additional term would be questionable.

If it was that simple to get the same page to rank for multiple terms just by duplicating content, linking to it, and then redirecting with the canon tag - I am sure google would get wise to that pretty quick, and there would be no end of "top secret ranking" mails doing the rounds from "SEO gurus"

Would be interesting to test though!

[KeriMorgret]

Google views the canonical tag as a hint, and reserves the right to ignore it if the pages don't look to be virtually identical in content, so it would depend in part on how much of the content is duplicate. If it's your own site, you can always give it a try and see. If it's a client site and they're depending on both pages ranking for conversions, I'd warn them first that you might lose the rankings from Page B.