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I would say so long as it says in small text on the bottom: such and such plugin brought to you by yoursite and you add the option for individuals to add a rel=nofollow (most people will forget) then it's perfectly legitimate link juice. But make sure to have something about the plugin on the page itself, otherwise you could be penalized for lack of relevency...

Hi Alan,

All of the pages on the subdomain have a robots meta with noindex, follow on them. The pages are only used for data collection (forms), and the clients do not want their pages showing up in google, which is why extracting link juice shouldn't be a problem. As such, the canonical url need not be indexed.

From what I understand, if a page has duplicate content and specifies a rel=canonical, url, the inbound link juice effectively gets syphoned into the original content page. What I'm wondering is, which page does google use for the purpose of propagating outbound link juice?

Lets say a company (provider.com) offers a whitelabel solution which enables each client to have all of the content on their own domain (product.client.com), with no branding by the content provider.

Now lets say that client.com is a site with a lot of authority, and to promote the launch of product.client.com, they put a lot of links from their main site to the subdomain. This can be very valuable link juice, and provider.com would like to be able to take advantage. The problem is, that client.com wouldn't like it if provider.com put in links on their whitelabel site.

Suppose the following:

All pages on product.client.com start to have a rel="canonical" link to themselves, with a get variable (e.g. product.client.com/page.htm -> product.client.com/page.html?show_extra_link=true)

When the page is visited with the extra get parameter "show_extra_link" a link appears in the footer that points to provider.com

My question is, would this have the same effect for provider.com as placing a link on the non-canonical version of the pages on the whitelabel site would?

I would say so long as it says in small text on the bottom: such and such plugin brought to you by yoursite and you add the option for individuals to add a rel=nofollow (most people will forget) then it's perfectly legitimate link juice. But make sure to have something about the plugin on the page itself, otherwise you could be penalized for lack of relevency...