Does Google crawl and spider for other links in rel=canonical pages?

[ReferralCandy]

When you add rel=canonical to the page, will Google still crawl your page for content and discover new links in that page?

[mememax]

Hi RefCandy first of all canonical tag is a recommendation to spiders not a rule, so google will probably crawl your page.

Moreover the canonical tag prevents duplication issues not crawling itself there are many sites which uses self referring canonicals so there's no issue on your crawling rate at the beginning. However when google discovers the duplication of that page with the other you've set up it'll end crawling that page with less frequency, so it will give less value to some links in there.

The only rule which prevent links crawl is the nofollow tag in the page .

[SEOAndy]

or robots.txt file

also nofollow isn't a rule it's also a guide - most SE's see and listen to it but  some ignore it, even Google has been known to ignore it on some sites.