I realise this is a topic which has probably been covered to infinity, however I have my own little question so hope the mods wont mind me opening a new threat on canonical issues.I have a post on website A, the post have received numerous links and mentions from a wide range of blogs (not owned by me) the post attracted about 40k visitors constantly over a 2-week period as it went viral on social media.However, I am now in the horrible process of changing domains since my current domain name, drastically limits my audience. Currently Im doing a rel=canonical pointing towards the new domains corresponding pages, via yoast. I'm also adding links from the old domain to the new domains corresponding pagesMy ProblemWhen doing a copy and paste text search the post still shows up under my old domain with no mention of the post on my new domain in the SERPS. However when I do a site:mydomain search I can see the post has been indexed on my new domain for what that is worth?Additional InfoThe canonical link is 2-days old now, does it take a certain amount of time to get updated?Can the fact that the post went so viral and have multiple links on other websites and social media play a role in the canonical link getting ignored?Im using Yoast SEO from Wordpress for the canonical so I am pretty sure everything is correctly setup I have also inspected the source code and all looks good to me6-hours after setting up the canonical on the old domain I went to google webmaster console and fetched the page with the newly added canonical link, and submitted it to index, was this a stupid thing to do?Any advice and help appreciated
Canonical tag not getting honoured or is it?
seo;duplicate content;canonical url
The canonical link is 2-days old now, does it take a certain amount of time to get updated?Yes, and this process can take a LOT longer than 2 days.Can the fact that the post went so viral and have multiple links on other websites and social media play a role in the canonical link getting ignored?I wouldn't say it's getting ignored, it's more that Google doesn't recalculate instantly.6-hours after setting up the canonical on the old domain I went to google webmaster console and fetched the page with the newly added canonical link, and submitted it to index, was this a stupid thing to do?No, it neither helps nor hurts you. As long as you have the sitemaps fed into GWT and Yoast is working properly, Google will re-index and see the canonical tag in its own time.tl;dr Patience and, as has been said by others, 301 Redirect Permanent is your friend over time. Also, you know when rel=canonical is not working because a site gets penalized for duplicate content.  As long as one post or the other is ranking well you're okay.