Duplicate posts and canonical link

Hello.

Just a quick question on the canonical URL. Let’s say I already wrote a blog post on ‘Python Lists’ for example (just making it up). Now I’m making a course-like structure where I will be writing a series of posts on Python and one of them will be ‘Python Lists’. Can I just duplicate the existing page and then use the URL of the original post as the canonical link on the duplicated post? Is this the correct way of doing things? Most of my posts are ranking good on google so, I don’t want to mess it up by having duplicates.

Right, canonical urls are for saying that another post is the ‘real’ one that should get the rank.

Never set a post’s canonical URL to itself - it causes the post to disappear from the sitemap. (Actually, setting ANYTHING for canonical URL causes a post to disappear…)

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