What is the best content spinner?

Does a rel=canonical link remove all SEO value from the page linking back to the original content?

• I have a website for a local company that publishes quality content to an on-site blog. We're expanding to a new geographic region, and I'm in the process of building another website targeting the new region. I'd like to include a blog section on the new website, which will pull in any content/posts from our existing blog. I primarily want to do this for the added SEO benefit of having fresh, relevant content that's frequently updated on your website. However, I would of course need to add a rel=canonical link back to the original blog in order to ensure I don't get any duplicate content penalties from posting the same content across two separate domains. My question is whether adding that rel=canonical link will eliminate the SEO value of that content being posted to the new website? I'm not really talking about which blog post would show up in SERPs, as I understand that the point of the rel=canonical tag is to provide attribution to the primary source of the content. I'm more concerned about whether using a rel=canonical on the content would eliminate the secondary SEO benefit of having relevant, frequently updated content on your website, due to Google being essentially "blind" to the duplicate content.

• Answer:

  I wouldn't advise you to create a blog on a new site and copy the content from another site - even if you do use rel=canonical. The rel=canonical isn't really designed for this, although it has been proven to work cross-domain as your talking about. Doing it occasionally would be fine and there are instances when I can see the benefit of doing so, but across hundreds or thousands of posts could look a bit strange and isn't really a long term content strategy you want to pursue. In short, Google almost certainly won't give you credit for having fresh content if your just copy it and use the rel=canonical on every post. Also, all the link juice you gain from the blog content will go to the old site anyway and leave your new site thirsty :) Perhaps just do it occasionally when you have a great post you want to promote in two places, and try to publish some unique content on the new site that isn't available anywhere else.