Rel="canonical" or text link?

[fazza47]

Lets say I have a commercial website that nobody will link to so I create a non commercial website with some awesome content that is highly linkable.

I then get 30 - 40  quality links pointing to this site which I then either rel ="canonical" back to my main site to the page with the replica content or  do I simply add a text link from the new site to the old sites homepage.

Which would benefit my commercial site most?

We are seeing the strategy of building a non commercial site for links becoming more and more popular.  The second question is is it worth the effort for in effect one backlink?

[firstconversion]

I would try both and see what happens

The problem with rel canonical though, is that your not using it as intended and could get caught out or have the link devalued

I dont see any problem with a plain text link. personally i would KISS and use the text link

As to whether its worth it, it depends how good the linkbait is and how many links/power it gathers. The only way you can know is to try and then see the effect on your rankings.

You could certainly get more value than one link out of it though; link out to other articles that link back to your ecom site.

When you have this type of  powerful 3rd party site, you can then start swapping links from your site in return for links from theirs to your ecommerce site