: Canonical tag not getting honoured or is it? I realise this is a topic which has probably been covered to infinity, however I have my own little question so hope the mods wont mind me opening

@Barnes591

The canonical link is 2-days old now, does it take a certain amount of time to get updated?


Yes, and this process can take a LOT longer than 2 days.


Can the fact that the post went so viral and have multiple links on other websites and social media play a role in the canonical link getting ignored?


I wouldn't say it's getting ignored, it's more that Google doesn't recalculate instantly.


6-hours after setting up the canonical on the old domain I went to google webmaster console and fetched the page with the newly added canonical link, and submitted it to index, was this a stupid thing to do?


No, it neither helps nor hurts you. As long as you have the sitemaps fed into GWT and Yoast is working properly, Google will re-index and see the canonical tag in its own time.

tl;dr Patience and, as has been said by others, 301 Redirect Permanent is your friend over time.

Also, you know when rel=canonical is not working because a site gets penalized for duplicate content. As long as one post or the other is ranking well you're okay.

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@BetL925

I am now in the horrible process of changing domains


you should 301 the old to the new, all urls, one by one. Don't canonicalize old urls - canonical is just a recommendation, and you use it in wrong way. Canonical doesn't replace redirect - it signalize to search engines, an url's content is slightly similar to its canonical url.

What you should do is to remove all signals from the old domain to the new. And this can be done only by 301 redirect. You will loose some link equity, ca. 10-15%, but it will come again, after your old domain is off, some time passed away and you earn some new links to the new domain.

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