yea me too: Listening to Matt Cutts here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/rel-canonical-html-head/ If you want to fast forward to: 1:30 and it seems to me that hes saying that you can have a canonical from what I understand: anywhere. Hearing that and wondering how the search engines REALLY interpret iframes ( as they want to read a site more like a human ) how will they handle the canonical.

Sure not 100% of the site actually us a duplicate but the main stuff is. It makes me wonder. I'll really know if I see a backlink from eBay in OSE. ( not saying that that is the goal but the content is ours and if the shoe was on the other foot and we getting penalized..)

Hmm - if you did 50 per week for 2 weeks then did 100 for 3 weeks and 150 for 4 weeks then you wont be looked at as spammy. Think of this: when do you think those links will get indexed anyway? It's best to keep a chart of what you did each day and come back and check to see if it's there or not. ( like blog commenting )

If you are doing blog commenting them maybe you can subscribe to responses as well. But like EGOL said: natural. As long as you're not using software to build links then you will be fine. The question is: How many links CAN you build a day?

Well, if you're on a VPS/Dedicated Machine. - I would take a look at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/rewrite/rewritemap.html

RewriteMap has 0 effect on the load time like if you were to have the same in .htaccess it will eat those redirect rules. Remember 301s cache in the browser so when you're testing have them all 302s until you're happy and then watch your rewrite log when you launch. If you need help let us know.

This does take some knowhow and learning but you should be able to get this done in a few days. ( testing, reading documentation )

My client is generating templates for his eBay template based on content he has on his eCommerce platform.

I'm 100% sure this will cause duplicate content issues. My question is this.. and I'm not sure where eBay policy stands with this but adding the canonical tag to the template.. will this work if it's coming from a different page i.e. eBay?

Update:

I'm not finding any information regarding this on the eBay policy's: http://ocs.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?CustomerSupport&action=0&searchstring=canonical

So it does look like I can have rel="canonical" tag in custom eBay templates but I'm concern this can be considered: "cheating" since rel="canonical is actually a 301 but as this says: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html it's legitimately duplicate content.

The question is now: should I add it or not?

UPDATE seems eBay templates are embedded in a iframe but the snap shot on google actually shows the template. This makes me wonder how they are handling iframes now. looking at http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml does shows the content inside the iframe. Interesting.

Anyone else have feedback?