Can I use rel=canonical when publishing articles on different sites?

Here's a question from B Flicker in Los Angeles, California.

If we were to syndicate my written content entire articles to multiple domains, then would we be able to use the eminent forthcoming cross domain link rail equals tag to confirm which site we would like to index for a given piece of content?

It certainly wouldn't hurt, and I wouldn't be surprised if it would help, and it would work whenever you syndicate your content. I always recommend that you include a link to the original source so that if you have two things with roughly the same page rank and one guy is linking to the other guy, this guy should get a little more page rank and he'll be a little more likely to win.

So whenever you're syndicating your content, it's very helpful if you link to the original source in the same way, including relief. Canonical can help send the message that the official location for this content is over here.

That's kind of nice because you can only give that away.

You can't claim I am the canonical for that content over there, but you can take this URL and you can sort of give it to the other person.

So that is a recommendation that I would make if you're syndicating content because I think that we are very far along the path of being able to look at Relocal and apply across domains.