Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?

[MeghanPrudencio]

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

[MeghanPrudencio]

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!

[StalkerB]

How similar is the content?

I'm pretty sure you're not going to pass any link juice or authority to the new page using a canonical tag, especially if it has different content; it's just not a great way to fix anything.

Useful if the URL changes depending on how you end up at a destination page, but if you just happen to have 2 different pages about 'widgets' then sharing a canonical tag between them won't do too much.

Can you give me an example of what it is you're actually doing and why you think the pages should be the same? (I'm just not getting the impression they are the same page, sorry if I'm wrong)

[MeghanPrudencio]

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?

[MeghanPrudencio]

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.

[StalkerB]

If you've made an entirely new page with the same content and it's in the one location and you can change all your links to look there, then 301 the old page to the new page, don't just use rel=canonical.

If you've added a new category, so the old page was, for example, site/colour/product and you now allowed navigation like site/shape/product, then you may want to change the canonical tag if the 'shape' route into the page is the new "official" page.