Webmasters Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for webmasters. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
On a website I have, for example two pages with identical content. I want to keep both URLs active so instead of redirecting one to another I will put rel=canonical on one, to the other.
BOTH of them are currently indexed by Google in the search results, will one of them drop over time?
Will canonical URLs disappear from SERPs? Or will they only pass link juice?
Setting a rel="canonical" doesn't necessarily prevent both (canonical and non-canonical) URLs from being "indexed", but it indicates a preference as to which URL should be returned in the SERPs.
If Google recognises that both URLs do indeed serve the same content then in time, Google should return only the canonical URL in the SERPs.
There is a difference between being indexed and being ranked for a keyword:
If there are two URLs, one of them links with rel="canonical" to the other, they are often both indexed. Google's goal is that only one of these two URLs rank, namely the one which is declared as canonical. If neither is declared as canonical, then both URLs remain in the index, but both of them will rank low or don't even rank at all.
