Pass Google Juice to another domain without a 301 redirect

Question

Is there a way to move juice from one domain to another (either the whole domain or page-by-page)?

I was thinking on adding a rel="canonical" on every page on the old domain linking to the new one, but will that pass the juice?

The main purpose is to keep the two domains alive so users can still visit the old domain (and allow them to go to the new one manually) instead of forcing a 301 redirect, at least during a few months before turning the old one down.

Related: Passing link juice through canonical link (it is 2 years old though)

Answer 1

To answer your question in short: within a website using rel="canonical" will pass link juice from page A to page B. Google says both the canonical tag and the 301-redirect, with a slight loss, will pass link juice.

However: the canonical tag is ofted used within a website instead of between different websites (externally). As written in the original blog post about cross domain canonical tags by Google, they prefer 301-redirects. If you need the new domain to rank I advise you to use as much 301-redirects as possible because the topic of cross-domain canonical tags passing link juice is quite tricky. I don't really believe in it. I'd much rather use a 301-redirect. Please keep in mind that the canonical tag was invented to fix problems, especially duplicate content problems. It's a band aid.

So in summary: go for the 301-redirects if you need the new domain to rank as good and fast as possible. If that's not the main goal you can experiment with the cross domain canonical tag.

Answer 2

Using rel="canonical" is an acceptable solution. I believe that you may lose slightly more "juice" than with a 301 redirect. This Google video implies they are basically the same, but you should use 301 redirects wherever possible (for user experience more than anything).