Can you canonical from one domain page to a different domain page

[tdawson09]

We are a boating site and have our main site with all it's products. We have an engine section within our main site. But we also have an outside domain, specific to a certain manufacturer of engines. So we want our customers to still find the engine information for this manufacturer within our main site, as well as find the manufacturer targeted engine site in the SERPS.

My question is this: Can I canonical those pages within our main site to pages on the outside domain? Or does are canonicals to be used only within the same domain?

Thanks,

[BeanstalkIM]

Well - he's done more than a few so it's easy for one to go MIA.  Like a Cutts video.

[tdawson09]

Dave:

Thanks again. I just watched Rand's whiteboard Friday on this, and it gave me some additional ideas on some old sites that we have, to utilize the value of those pages by canonicalizing those pages to our main website.

I usually watch a lot of Rand's whiteboards, but must have missed this one.

Thanks!

[tdawson09]

Craig:

Thanks for your input. We are trying to determine how best to maintain the traffic and value on our outside engine site, but still give our boaters on the main page the info they are looking for without clicking away to another (manufacturer) page. Having duplicate pages makes sense to us, but making sure that Google gives the manufacturer page the value. So a canonical seems logical for what we are trying to accomplish. We have hundred's of thousands of pages on our main site, so we are not concerned of losing value there. However, we do want to keep and build the value of our manufacturer pages. That is where we want our traffic to go when they are looking for that manufacturer-specific product.

Thanks again for your input!

[tdawson09]

Thank you for your reply. I'll check Rand's video. I'm assuming it is one of his white board Friday discussions? In the meantime I did find Google's take on it. It was on their Webmaster Central Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

Thanks again for responding!

[CHarkins]

While you can use a cross-domain canonical from your main site to the engine's site, are you sure that you should?

When you canonical the page, you're telling Google "Hey, the page you're on is functionally the same as this other page here. That other page should be the one that gets the credit for this content."

If your primary goal is to have your main page ranking, then you don't want to be telling Google to take away it's credit for your more narrowly focused engine site.

What I would rather do is work to make each of those pages unique - perhaps the main boating site would contain the broader information on the engines as well as reviews/ratings from current customers but then link to the engine-specific site within that page to get to thinks like additional manufacturer specs, repair guides, etc.

That way you are focusing each page better for the target customer and sharing some link equity between the two pages, rather than directing it all at the more narrow domain.

[BeanstalkIM]

In 2011 Google extended the canonical tag to support cross-domain.  Rand made a video of it ...

watch?v=O8drPXudZZc