hi all, i have page [a], and page . i want page to get the rankings of page [a]. normally, i would 301 [a]-->, but the problem is that page [a] is still meaningful to me... so the next best thing is to implement the rel="canonical" tag, right? but the problem is that page [a] is not equa in it's content to page . so, what do you think? should i expect a loss of rankings if i put the canonical tag from [a] -->?
If you 301 redirect [a] to then the engines will transfer credit for the inbound links to page [a] over to page . Where you will run into problems is that if page is not about the same topic as page [a] then those inbound links you just transfered credit for are not relevant to . If page 's <title>, <h1>, <h2>s, content, etc. are not equivalent to page [a]'s as far as the keywords being targeted then your rankings will likely suffer. How badly depends on how different the pages are.