Effect of rel canonical on links

[Burgo]

Has anyone done any experimentation on how Google treats links that are on a page that is being "rel canonical'd" to another page?

For eg, example.com/b has a canonical pointing to example.com/a

How does Google treat the internal links that are on page example.com/b?

[CodyWheeler]

I can't say I've analyzed this in detail, but I would believe since rel=canonical is meant to be used to denote extremely similar content or even content that is exactly the same, that the way it handles links on the B page shouldn't matter, since this should be essentially the exact same as the content on the A page.

[Burgo]

FYI everyone, I've only just come across this video where Matt Cutts (kind of) deals with this question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSQzUixVCzo

Just because a page is rel canonical'd to another page does not mean Google will not crawl those links.

[RyanKent]

Nice video.

Keep in mind rel=canonical is designed for pages which presently basically the same content. For example if you sell widgets then you might have a page sorted by price ascending, another by price descending, another by color, etc. All of these pages show the same content presented slightly differently. Often the links on each page will be identical.