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You're right. As I was writing my response I realized this is not a good way to go about it. There's really no reason to keep these duplicate content pages. We are pulling content from our database of clients and some of them had been entered more than once in our system, so they created duplicate pages of content and we were thinking we would want the latest version of the client's content which would also contain the active order in our system to be the "main page" but we really just need to remove the older ones instead.

Thanks so much for your help, and I am sorry for the confusion!

Thank you for your response, Barry!

So, if we do just change the "official" page and make that page the canonical URL it won't hurt the rankings or anything that the original canonical URL had?

Thanks for your response Ian!

We aren't looking to completely replace the page, we just want to change the canonical page to the latest one added and I am looking to find out if that does any sort of damage to whatever linkjuice or ranking the original canonical page has or if it will just transfer. Sorry if it is confusing.

Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page?

Thanks so much!

-Amy