Rel Canonical on Home Page

[AlightAnalytics]

I have a client who says they can't implement a 301 on their home page.  They have tow different urls for their home page that are live and do not redirect.  I know that the best solution would be to redirect one to the main URL but they say this isn't possible.   So they implemented the rel canonical instead.  Is this the second best solution for them if they can't redirect?  Will the link juice be passed through the rel canonical?

Thanks!

[kaushalshah]

For Example: You have two version of home page (1) http version (2) https then in that case you have implement Canonical on home page. Many big sites who does financial transaction use the same approach.

[EhrenReilly]

Yes.  One additional thing you can try to do to help Google get the correct page is to make sure all your internal links from both domains point to the target domain that you want to have in the index.  For example, if your sites are mydomain1.com and mydomain2.com, and you want to canonicalize everything to mydomain1.com, then any links on mydomain2.com that point to the homepage should point to http://www.mydomain1.com/index.html not to http://www.mydomain1.com/index.html

[NakulGoyal]

Yes, that works. Essentially, I think a canonical is a better solution. So it's perfect. After a couple days, check the 2 URLs in Google using cache:url1.com and cache:url2.com and see if Google detects them both as the one you are using in your canonical tag.

[danatanseo]

Yes, I believe this is probably the best solution. Regarding the passing of rank, etc, nothing will really change from how it is now, except that one page will clearly be defined as the original content. This may help boost the page authority of the page with the canonical tag. Whatever authority that original content page has should pass to other pages the same as it is now.