Linking to AND canonicalizing to a page?

[ThridHour]

I am using cross domain rel=canonical to a page that is very similar to mine. I feel the page adds value to my site so I want users to go to it, but I ultimately want them to go to the page I'm canonicalizing to. So I am linking to that page as well. Anyone foresee any issues with doing this? And/or have other suggestions? Thanks.

[EGOL]

I have a page on one of my sites (DomainA) that was originally published on another one of my sites (DomainB).  I have rel=canonical on the DomainA page pointing to the same page on DomainB.  I also have a link that says something like... "Originally published on DomainB.com".

It seems to be working great.  The page on DomainA does not appear in the Google, Bing or Yahoo SERPs.  The page on DomainB has kickass rankings in all three search engines.

[Alex-Harford]

I've overseen a few websites that duplicated the occasional article between themselves. I always recommended exactly as EGOL said, and it worked fine. The duplicate article on Site B had a canonical link to the original on Site A, and the "Originally published here" link was added at the bottom of the duplicated version of the article.

If the page is relevant to the audiences on both websites I don't foresee any major problems. The only issue I'd see is if you overdid this and started to copy a high percentage of pages. The search engines don't always get it right - they can choose to ignore a canonical and sometimes a duplicate on a higher authority website might outrank the original on a lower authority website, but this has never happened to me.