Hi Alick,

Traffic is always good and referral traffic would be quite interested if they click through from a product that is being offered.

I wouldn't worry about the number of links because I suspect they are nofollowed - and even if they aren't, you can easily disavow at a domain level if they are causing you concern. There you get the best of both worlds - no worry about unnatural links and still get referral traffic.

-Andy

IMO it is quite natural please share your views.

Well, it's natural in as much as you didn't request them, but they will do nothing for your SEO. For this reason, I suspect you will find Google will completely ignore them.

The best links are those that are earned by creating amazing content that others want to share with their visitors, not by a link in a coupon page.

Not a legitimate link building strategy I'm afraid.

-Andy

No worries Shawn. I also hope it doesn't cause issues down the line. Everything in me is screaming "Don't do it!"

Best of luck.

-Andy

Cyrus explains this in a little more details here:

If your topic is the football, you’ll find it hard to rank for “Super Bowl,” but slightly easier to rank for “Super Bowl 2014” - and easier yet to rank for “Best Super Bowl Recipes of 2014.”

Apply that to cars...

If your topic is cars, you’ll find it hard to rank for “Chevrolet Cars” but slightly easier to rank for “Chevrolet Cars 2015” - and easier yet to rank for “Upcoming Chevrolet Car Deals for 2015”

And...

It’s much easier, and much more profitable, to rank for 100s or even 1,000s of long tail keywords with the same piece of content.

Pay close attention to this...

The biggest mistakes people make with keyword research are:

1. Choosing keywords that are too broad
2. Keywords with too much competition
3. Keywords without enough traffic
4. Keywords that don’t convert
5. Trying to rank for one keyword at a time

-Andy

Well, if it works (which I didn't think it would!) then I guess that answers one question - and I ran that page through Screaming Frog just to confirm there are no issues and it does indeed canonical back to the https version of the page.

I just can't get out of the mindset that the format looks wrong. I haven't seen other instances of it done that way, and like you, have no documentation to suggest issues that might be caused.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

-Andy

Example of what they would like to do

That would be a no-no Shawn. If you are running over SSL, then you need to canonical back to the https version of the page. If you don't, you will end up with errors on the page (yellow warning triangle) and trust issues with Google. What they would like to do is canonical to a malformed URL which it could interpret as a file.

Try going to any URL and just entering it as //www.domain.com

-Andy