This is from an exploration of what you can and can’t do with canonicals. It has been shown before that they will move rank. Can you use them in any other devious way? What would happen if you were to duplicate a page 50000 times? What happens if you duplicate a high value page and add a sneaky link in there? What if it’s a low one?
Most likely, Google will ignore the canonical unless it has more ‘juice’ than the original, in which case, where does the link appear from if you can hit that stage? After Bill’s post on tracking down canonical negative seo, is there a positive way to use them? We test those out.
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Do Inserted Links in Canonical Pages Count?
Jo, one of our regular testers have been doing a lot of testing with iframes and this is an extension of something that he saw within the SIA Skype group where Bill was talking about some negative SEO with canonicals and he was wondering if this can be done in a positive way.
If you were to place an extra link on a page that is canonicalized to another, will it boost a page? What he was actually talking about was, you’ve got a target page which is the page you are trying to rank, what if you duplicated it and canonicalized it back to itself, would it get a boost? The idea is, what if you do this multiple times?
What he found was that, you can. Set two is the important set, moving up to the third up to that second set, but duplicating a page and canonicalizing it back to its original self, you can get a boost. You can take a money page and duplicate it for “innocent” purposes. That is the kind of thing that you could canonicalize to itself, you can link back to itself, and you can get a boost with that. So when you are looking for those opportunities for link building and boosting from your own site, this is actually a pretty interesting opportunity.
Did the other pages get indexed before adding the canonical?
Yes, they indexed as I recall from talking with Jo. It’s actually a cool thing, just taking a page that you already built, copying it, and canonicaling it because you are saying – hey, this was a copy – and then, you can get a link boost out of a page that you already built. You could do it in your pbns, you can have a whole hidden set, basically your entire site duplicated as you build it out. I think this is what Weebly does.
If you have a site, Weebly creates a subdomain that they do not show you in the same way, it’s almost the same thing and people talk about how Weebly sites are still good for that - that if you are building because it kind of creates a duplicate page but it does a canonical. Let’s say you want to build links to your pbn, you build a canonicalized page and no one is ever finding those links and they won’t see how you were actually doing your link building.