Google Updates Guidance on Cross-Domain Canonicals

Google has recently updated its guidance on cross-domain canonicals for syndicated content, except for syndicated news, which remains the same.
A canonical link element is a way to inform search engines that a webpage should not be considered as the original source of the content.
Cross-domain canonicals refer to duplicate pages that appear on an entirely different website. On May 2, 2022, Google removed guidance on cross-domain canonicals without any explicit statement to confirm the change, leading to confusion among users.

However, they have updated their documentation since then. The guidance changes for syndicated content, which is not news content, include the removal of a recommendation to use cross-domain canonicals in their Crawling and Indexing Guidance and the addition of new guidance that recommends against using cross-domain canonicals for syndicated content on their page for fixing canonical issues.
For syndicated news content, Google recommends using cross-domain canonicals as prescribed in their existing guidance, which instructs on avoiding article duplication in Google News.

There are two ways to handle syndicated news content: for news content syndicated within one’s own site or network, use the rel=»canonical» tag, and for news content syndicated to third-party sites, have syndication partners use the «noindex» meta robots tag directive to prevent Googlebot-News from crawling and indexing the syndicated content.

Google also published guidance in December 2009, which advises on the use of cross-domain canonicals for syndicated content or product descriptions, but it is likely superseded by the new guidance for non-news content on their canonicals troubleshooting webpage.