(Entry was posted by David Jones on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 11/29/2014).

What if both articles have the rel="canonical" tag pointing back to itself?

What happens if an article is syndicated on another site but both articles have the rel="canonical" tag pointing back to itself? Is it just a case of whichever page was published first with that canonical tag that is judged to be the original source by Google? If the syndicating site has higher authority than the original source site and they are both using the tag like this which one will rank the highest? ?

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David Jones: What happens if an article is syndicated on another site but both articles have the ;rel="canonical" tag pointing back to itself? Is it just a case of whichever page was published first with that canonical tag that is judged to be the original source by Google? If the syndicating site has higher authority than the original source site and they are both using the tag like this which one will rank the highest? ;