Canonical Tags & Search Bots

[MargaritaS]

Does anyone know for sure if search engine bots still crawl links on a page whose canonical tags are set to a different page? So in short, would it be similar to a no-index follow?

Thanks!

-Margarita

[Zkwarta]

As far as I know the SE's will still index the content - and its up to "their discretion" whether or not to use a canonical.

[Dr-Pete]

I haven't seen a solid test of this. From the SEs standpoint, the canonical source and target should be identical, so it wouldn't matter. Of course, they honor canonical tags on non-identical pages all the time, so we no practically that there are differences. My gut is that a canonical probably won't cut off a crawl path, but the links on the non-canonical version are unlikely to pass link-juice.

I would not, just on general principle treat a canonical like a NOINDEX, FOLLOW. If it's important that the links on the non-canonical version be followed, then either: (1) The canonical tag is not an appropriate solution, (2) Those links should be added to the canonical version.

If you could give an example (don't need URLs - just explain the nature of the two pages), I could dig deeper.