How do I reverse the action of a canonical tag?

[mancunian]

OK so I set up some cross domain canonical tags a while ago and now want Google to follow new canonical tags which self reference my page (rather than to reference a page on another domain).

Can I just simply change the canaonical tag and hope that Google will re crawl the page and now see the canonical hint has changed to be self referencing?

I am just slightly concerned that the original cross domain tag means Googlebot won't even bother crawling my page anymore to see that the tag has been changed and so making it very hard to get my page ranked at all in the future.

[not2easy]

If you have inserted a canonical link to another domain, edit that out. That link would suggest the other domain has the same type of canonical link. Cross domain canonical links are intended for your own domains, not for a copy of your content found on a domain someone else owns. The copy should be canonical linked to your URL.

You can change your link and wait. Google is not bound by canonical links, they are seen as a preference so yes, you have told Google to index the other content, not yours.

[lucy24]

I am just slightly concerned that ... Googlebot won't even bother crawling my page anymore

This does not happen. Cannot happen. Will not happen. Just this past weekend G came by, asking for a clutch of URLs that have been redirected since December 2013 (really) and have returned 410 since June 2019 (ditto).

[NickMNS]

Google doesn't guarantee that it will follow canonical links, these should be viewed as "recommendations". If you are removing them, then it is very likely that Google is already ignoring the recommendations. So simply remove them and don't stress it. As Lucy24 points out above Google crawls everything, they may not index or rank everything but that is a whole other topic.

Everything! I once had Google try to crawl a string in a javascript file that started with a slash, it thought it was a URL!

[mancunian]

Great feedback thank you