IanTurner - 4:38 pm on Feb 4, 2002 (gmt 0)

Okay, I have no firm experience either way here. However here are some thoughts, in general canonicals are used by large corporates and education establishments to give seperate IP addresses to different parts of the site.

This arose in the edu's out of the need for each dept. to maintain their own content. Thus each machine on the edu net had its own IP address and content maintained locally.

Similarly in the large corporate environment, but many of these corporate canonicals are due to sheer weight of load on the server. (Crude load balancing)

So I would say my gut feeling on the subject is that I wouldn't play with canonicals on the same IP address unless someone gave me some very convincing evidence that I couldn't make the top of the listings without using canonicals.

If I could split the canonicals over different IP addresses, one per sub-domain i would be happier doing so, espcially if my site were already overloading a single server.