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Let's say I have a syndicated post on site A that has a rel="canonical" towards the original post from site B.

Do the backlinks to this syndicated post bring any value for the site A Domain Authority?

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    Yes. Inbound (back links) will count toward the domain to which they point to. This is one reason why I do not recommend posting your content on other sites. It is a waste of your work. However, as recently discovered, canonical links also provide value something similar to a link. Still, I would not recommend working for someone else's site for free. Except this one. ;-)
    – closetnoc
    Jul 24, 2017 at 0:00

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Nope. A rel="canonical" isn't a backlink.

A rel="canonical" points to the preferred version of a page, its intention is to help search engines with duplicated content. It does not act as a link, but as a "suggestive" redirect.

If a search engine finds that both the canonical page has very similar content to the page on site A, it will only index the canonical page and ignore the page on site A. But if they appear to be quite different, search engines will index both pages.

If both pages do get indexed, a search engine could use the canonical link as a tie breaker when determining which page is more relevant. But this is not PageRank or Domain Authority stuff, this is just dealing with duplicates and ranking the more relevant pages higher.

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  • Actually, I was asking about something else. People republish content on Medium.com, for example. They are automatically set to canonical if you import them from your site. Do the backlinks from these republished articles increase medium's domain authority?
    – Punct Ulica
    Jul 22, 2017 at 19:35
  • I don't understand how that is about something else. rel="canonical" links are not backlinks.
    – Oskar Skog
    Jul 22, 2017 at 19:39
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Please note that canonicals are treated like 301 redirects so it will pass the PageRank to the specified canonical URL.

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NO, it only avoids duplicate content for Google. Either it is canonical or not, it do not affect ranking, the links with do follow and nofollow only matters.

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No, but they do the other way around. Any links that site A gets on the article then get passed through to site B.

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  • Do you have any articles or references to support your assertion? You may be correct, but without backing up your claim, this isn't a very good answer.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Sep 26, 2017 at 19:39

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