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Link placement and context influence transfer Links positioned in the main “content area” can transfer more equity than those buried in footers or sidebars, acting as a more potent vote of confidence. Google Search recognizes that editorial links within relevant content—like within a blog post or landing page copy—indicate stronger endorsements and more relevance than navigational or promotional links. The surrounding content context matters significantly. A link about “technical SEO audits” embedded within a paragraph discussing site optimization, for example, carries more relevance signals than the “Contact Us” link in the site’s navigational menu at the top of the blog. 

While exact-match anchor text isn’t required, descriptive anchor text helps search engines understand the destination page’s topic and purpose.

External links typically carry more weight per link (often correlating with the linking site’s authority), but internal links offer more control and scalability without veering into black-hat SEO strategy. A well-structured internal linking system can amplify the impact of external backlinks by distributing their equity strategically throughout your site.

Which is my canonical URL, according to Google? Use the URL Inspection tool to learn which page Google considers canonical. Note that even if you explicitly designate a canonical page, Google might choose a different canonical for various reasons, such as performance or content.

Use the cross-domain rel="canonical" link elementThere are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to move your website from a server that does not feature server-side redirects. In a situation like this, you can use the rel="canonical" link element across domains to specify the exact URL of whichever domain is preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible

In many cases, canonical tags will work much like 301-redirects, and do seem to pass link-juice. I've even seen experiments where people used canonical tags to move an entire domain. I wouldn't recommend it (except in rare cases), but it seemed to work

Google honors it to an almost ridiculous extent, where you can canonicalize a very different piece of content to another piece of content. However, if Google catches you doing this, it will stop trusting your site’s canonicals and thus cause you more harm…

Google said the best approach is to force your syndication partners to use the rel=canonical attribute to point to the content they distributed from your site. But Glenn Gabe said on Twitter he has seen Google not honoring that.

Google wants clear signals that are consistent and straightforward. When you start to confuse Google by communicating that one URL is more important than the other, but another signal says the opposite or you use the noindex to hide pages that you think are less important but want to pass that weight to other pages - it can ultimately confuse Google and come back to bite you

We'll generally pick the rel=canonical and use that over the noindex

A redirect from one page to an entirely different page will result in no PageRank being passed and will be considered a soft 404.

the 301 redirect will pass 100% PageRank only if the redirect was a redirect to a new page that closely matched the topic of the old page.

Is there any link equity loss from redirect chains?

Having said that, the only problem in using robots.txt in eliminating duplicate content is some people may be linking to the page that is excluded. That would prevent these links from contributing to your website's search engine ranking.

Combining The URL Removal Tool With The Basic Tools Google’s URL Removal Tool only removes the content from their index for 90 days, so it is not permanent. It is important, therefore, that you take additional steps to make sure that content does not come back into the index. You need to combine its use with one of the Basic Tools discussed above. Here is a table that represents how I look at the choices: Tactic When to Use URL Removal Tool, Plus Deleting Pages and All Links to them, Plus 301s to Best Fit Pages Always the best choice if there is no need for the pages to exist and if you are able to eliminate the pages. URL Removal Tool Plus Rel=Canonical Tagging The best remaining choice if preserving PageRank is a priority; however, you can only use this when your pages are a true duplicate or a strict subset of the pages that the tags point to. URL Removal Tool Plus NoIndex Tag Use when preserving PageRank is a priority, but the Rel=Canonical tag is not appropriate. URL Removal Tool Plus DisAllow in Robots.txt Use when reducing the number of pages that the search engines have to crawl is the priority.