How crawler decides which one is original if use the canonical tag (self reference) on each version of the duplicate content or page?

Question

To understand the query, let's take two sites https://www.abc.example/a https://www.xyz.example/a https://www.abc.example/a is an already existing site (it is already self canonicalize ) and https://www.xyz.example/a is a newly created site by me. I took the content from https://www.abc.example/a and put self canonicalization . So here my questions arrives that Which content is original content and which is duplicate? Which content will get more preference in the Google index?

Alex · Answer

Question 1:
The newer one will be the one with duplicate content, as search engines know the old one already (if they are indexed).
Question 2:
This depends on the overall SEO score. If both pages are kind of the same - the older one will win.
I've seen pages with duplicate content rank better as the pages where they got the content from.  But for something like this you would need to have way better technical SEO, a strong link profile and a fair amount of unique content. And of course.. it takes time. As usual.

How crawler decides which one is original if use the canonical tag (self reference) on each version of the duplicate content or page?

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