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Thanks for the update! I am glad it worked out for you.

Why do people jaywalk in a busy intersection? They want to get somewhere faster & are willing to take the risk of getting hit by a car because it "could never happen to them" OR They just don't know better, SEO is sort of this weird tiny little niche market that is not understood very well and to make matters worse, it changes every month... I have had good friends who are very smart but had to have long arguments with them on SEO, They love giving me text links, but to my name only "because linking to my NAME" is the best thing. I have to explaine to them over and over again that a text link that describes my product "boudoir photography"   "pin up photography" is much better...So they go the extra mile and spend oodles of time and make me a super pretty graphic and link to me from a banner... Same with PR0 linking essays & blog posts, they just don't know any better. (what was a GREAT solution 5 years ago is now hurting rankings) The funny thing about SEO in general is older sites still have higher rankings, so the OLD SEO advice in many cases is still at the top of SERPS. So every day people who are just learning read for days on how good linking from squidoo pages are...when in the past year it has taken a huge hit, same as paid blogs.... SEO is actually very harmful to the current relevant education of SEO....

Thanks, Andrew! I had done this for handfuls of pages at a time, but not an entire site and it had me concerned. I appreciate the advice!

Thanks for your reply, Alan. I also considered a screen scraper removing the canonical tag, but to me screen scraping seemed lazy in the first place and so maybe they wouldn't bother in most cases. I guess that a best practice with canonicals is really situation dependent.