Rel=canonical and internal links

[unirmk]

Hi Mozzers,

I was musing about rel=canonical this morning and it occurred to me that I didnt have a good answer to the following question:

• How does applying a rel=canonical on page A referencing page B as the canonical version affect the treatment of the links on page A?

I am thinking of whether those links would get counted twice, or in the case of ver-near-duplicates which may have an extra sentence which includes an extra link, whther that extra link would count towards the internal link graph or not.

I suspect that google would basically ignore all the content on page A and only look to page B taking into account only page Bs  links.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

[StephanSolomonidis]

It's an interesting question. I'll extend your example slightly, so that we have:

• Page A, with a canonical pointing to Page B
• Page A also has a regular link to Page C
• Page B does not link to Page C at all

At the crawling stage, Googlebot will parse all of the links on Page A. So in this case it discovers both B and C (if it doesn't know of their existence already). This is uncontroversial stuff—the use of the canonical tag doesn't affect crawling/discovery.

You might then assume that Google—if it decides to obey the canonical instruction, which of course it doesn't always do—will pass all of Page A's link equity to Page B (minus the small fraction), and then no longer count that link from A to C in the link graph. Almost like a redirect, but for bots only.

However, that doesn't seem to happen. The link from A to C is still included in the link graph. PageRank (or whatever's replaced it) may still flow through that link, even though Page A is not to be indexed.

So to answer your original question, the content of Page A will not be ignored, and neither will its links. The unclear bit is how much Google will value that link from A to C.

[unirmk]

Thanks a lot for your reply Stephan!

I would be super intertesting to read a little more around the subject. Do you have any studies or cases you might refer me to which describe the flow of link equity to "page C" from "Page A"?

Many thanks