Will rel=canonical cause a page to be indexed?
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Say I have 2 pages with duplicate content:
One of them is: http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage
This page is the one I want to be indexed on google (domain rank already built, etc.)
http://www.originalpage.com is more of an ease of use domain, primarily for printed material. If both of these sites are identical, will rel=canonical pointing to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage" cause it to be indexed? I do not plan on having any links on my site going to "http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage", they would instead go to "http://www.originalpage.com".
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Read your additional comment (to @Highland). If you canonical from a known page (indexed and linked to, internally and/or externally) to an unknown page with no links, it would act a bit like a 301-redirect, in theory. The target page (of the canonical) would start ranking as if it were the source page.
The problem is that that page isn't really canonical. You have a tag saying "This is the page" but every single other cue (internal links, inbound links, etc.) says that the non-canonical page is really canonical. In other words, your canonical tag says the opposite of everything else you're saying. That's generally not a good situation. If you want a page to be canonical, treat it that way. Sending Google mixed signals can get messy fast.
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Why would you point rel canonical to a page you don't want to rank?
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I probably phrased poorly...simpler question: If there is a page that nobody knows about, it hasn't been submitted, there are no links to it...the only way the outside world would ever know it exists is if they looked at a rel="canonical" tag...will google follow that canonical tag and index it?
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I actually have a completely different experience. Within the same domain, not between 2 domains. Lets say my page is http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage-1.html http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage-2.html http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage-3.html Each of them is actually http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage.html So each of the above pages (all 4) contain a canonical tag to the original page http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage.html What happens is when I check in the SERPS, nothing except http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage.html show up doing site: checks. However, if I do a cache: for any of the 4 pages, the http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage.html shows up. So Google identifies each of the URLs, but only returns http://www.originalsite.com/originalpage.html in my case.
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Canonical doesn't prevent a page from being indexed. Canonical allows you, the end user, to specify which of your duplicate pages to treat as the real page. Otherwise Google will pick one. The page still is in the index and is still crawled, it's just ignored for ranking purposes.
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