Lily Ray asked Google’s John Mueller what does Google do with all the ranking signals from the content syndication partners when Google Search decides which URL should be the canonical. It seems Google will consolidate most, if not all, of those signals to the Google-selected canonical in this case.

In short, if you have a news site that syndicates out its content to partners and for some reason Google decides that the original news site is not the original source, and assigns the canonical to one of the partners, what happens to the links and other signals pointing to the true original source?

Lily asked on X:

John Mueller from Google replied:

So yea, Google doesn’t use all those signals that Lily mentioned but the signals that Google does use, it seems to reward the canonical that Google has selected, even if it is wrong.

Here are those posts:

Here is a secondary response:

Google has provided guidance around syndication partners and Google Search and has promised to relay feedback from publishers on that guidance. It’s not an easy thing for Google to deal with and never really has been.

Forum discussion at X.

Update: Google’s Danny Sullivan added more clarification in this post:

He said: