Canonicals Passing Link Juice?

[HLTalk]

After having read this thread, the answer seems to be a tentative "Yes", but I am curious if I am doing this wrong, or causing myself problems, for a specific situation.

We have a thread on the forums that has over 50,000 views for that thread alone.  No doubt many people have linked to it across the web, and it ranks very well with Google.   But we are dealing with a major problem in that the main portion of our site (home page and core content) which are the most important, aren't ranking in Google at all.

A big part of this is because that part of the site hasn't been updated in years, whereas the forum is updated daily. By users.

We've begun putting out quality content in our News Center lately, and hoping to start boosting its presence in Google.  We have an article on the exact same topic that the forum thread covers.  I was thinking of putting a canonical on that thread, pointing to the article, and hopefully pointing some very powerful link juice, popularity, and traffic into our news center articles.   People can comment there as well if they like.

Are there any potential downsides to doing this?  My hope is that the forum thread loses rankings and the article takes on its rankings.

Thank you.

[MikeRoberts]

A Canonical is kind of like a Bots-Only 301 redirect. So, from a purely mechanical perspective, using a canonical can pass link equity to your other page without redirecting Users off of the forum thread. Now, this would be a deceptive use of the Rel=canonical tag and the bots would stop respecting it on those pages. Since a canonical is a suggestion, not a directive, if the bots think that your canonical is improper, deceptive, incorrect, etc. then they can just stop following it. Ultimately, using a canonical tag in the manner you're thinking wouldn't work out the way you would want it to. You might be able to pass equity from the one page to the other for a time... but that would not be a proper or best practices use of the tag and it would not have long term effects.

You'd be better served by looking at updating/expanding your content, internal linking, and backlink profile. And take a look at the article that Andy linked to in his response.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi,

I really wouldn't do that as the page match doesn't fit, Canonical similar pages only.

However, internal linking can help create strong 'hub' pages on a site and this is a great way to top up your homepage without getting into any form of redirection.

The best thing I can suggest is have a read of this article to understand how it works, how to do it, and what you can expect, but essentially, it is all about creating string text anchor links to your homepage. That's the short version

On top of this, just make sure you are doing the very best possible job on your homepage. Do a page audit to see what is working for you and what you might need to be updating.

-Andy