When Google introduced the rel canonical about 2 years ago, it took me a while to understand exactly how it works and what it’s interest was. As most people, I just saw it as a way to avoid being penalized by your own duplicate content and that’s about it.

I’ve been a long way since then and as my SEO knowledge progressed I started to see creative uses to it, especially when google reported they were now accepting cross domain rel canonicals:

And rand fishkin’s cross domain rel canonical experiment where clearly it seemed like totally identical content was not necessary :

In this post I’ll share 4 of these creative uses with you with the hope that it will give you more ideas (If you do come up with new ideas, please share them in the comment section)

1. Guest posting

Guest posting is a great way to do link building, you can get awesome links from high authority sites like us recently posting on the elance blog. However links pass very little link juice to your site overall and rel canonical can help you get your guest posting on steroids. Here is the method to do it the white hat way:
Write an amazing piece of content that is both relevant to what you do and the business you want to promote and the targeted website you want to get your rel canonical from.

Negotiate the guest post with them and try and get them to post the blog post on their blog/site and agree on adding a rel canonical to another copy of the blog 3-10 weeks down the line.

Once they agree, send them your amazing piece of content and let them share it with their readers/followers and let the piece earn natural links and shares.

4-10 weeks down the line, post the same post on your blog mentioning you posted it on that other big website (you can even link to it) and apply the rel canonical as agreed on the guest site.

Collect over 90% link juice from that post (much more powerful than a backlink).

Some of you may consider this a little bit grey but really you’re using the rel canonical as intended, to avoid duplicate and post a copy of someone’s content on your website, just with a little time lag. This is also a win win strategy. Big sites get amazing free content to post on their website and the search traffic for it for a period of time. On the other hand, you get to earn great links you wouldn’t have earned because your site may not be as big as the guest site.

2. Product reviews

This one is great for ecommerce stores that are usually poor in content when it comes to product pages. This is particularly useful for bestseller products/products with a lot of searches. Here is how I do it:

First of all, find your best seller products/products with a decent volume through a regular keyword research.

Once you’ve identified them, write a nice yet controversial/unique perspective review about it and post it on your (or someone elses’s) blog (linking to your product page).

Do regular link building to it, find conversations about it, twitter convos etc and drop the link to that review (making it a lot more legitimate than a product page on an ecommerce store)

Apply the rel canonical to your product page.

You just earned high quality links on a deep ecommerce store page and stand good chances to rank for its name and make sales ☺.

3. Filling your site with content that’s not yours

So you just got started with your website and have very little content yet no money to spend. This probably results in you providing a poorer user experience than the competition? That sucks, but there is a free, easy solution to try and fix that problem (temporarily, you should always get your site some more good content).

You can simply browse other websites about your topic, take their content, post it on yours and rel canonical to the page you took for them (preferably asking them first and explaining the advantages for them). This way, the users coming to your site feel you have a deep, rich site that can really answer their query while the people you took content from stand a fair chance of earning links through that tactic you’re using. Once again it’s a win win if the other party understands the advantages of it.

This tactic also allows you to display more of your ads/increase the page view and overall improve user metrics, which is great to avoid any kind of panda penalty.

4. Legacy pages

So you write good content? Great! You update it often? Amazing! Now that freshness is a major ranking factor, updating your content is a great way to take over engines real estate. However, it’s kind of sad that you have to erase old content that may have been good to update it or create a new url and start it’s link building from scratch ☹. There is a solution. As you update your content, feel free to place it on the new page and point a rel canonical to it! So that the old ones do not stay on the engines but pass their link juice to the most updated one while still letting the users access the old ones for legacy purposes.

A word of warning with that tactic. Avoid chaining rel canonicals because I expect Google to act the same way they act with 301s with it, which means they’ll stop following them after 2 or 3 redirects as you can see in the following video by Matt Cutts:

Apart from that, using your rel canonical this way is a totally legit way of keeping good content on your website while optimizing your link equity for the most updated information.

That’s all for this post. I’d love to hear how you guys use rel canonicals in comments so feel free to share it with us!

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