Rel Canonical tag usage on ECommerce website

[Blenny]

Hello,

I have read up on the rel canonical tag and I'm ready to apply it to my site's categorization structure.

However, I'm concerned that, because my website does not have a "view all" button for our product pages, the rel canonical tag would not be appropriate.

For example, if you come to my site's main category url, you come to

mysite.com/main-category

At this level - you get the top 12 items in the category.

if you want to see the next page, you click a crawlable link that goes to

mysite.com/main-category12-24

etc. etc.

The site does not offer a view all function.

Would applying the rel canonical tag be appropriate in this instance, or do I have to let Google crawl and index each page independantly?

Thanks.

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

I'd impliment rel=rev and rel=next on the pages to imply that their paginated, with the first page mentioned being the first in the chain.

rel=canonical then should point to the actual url, not the view-all page.

I think that is the 'correct' implimention for paginated content since rel=prev and rel=next were introduced.

[Blenny]

Wow, thanks alot I hadn't heard this was even available. Any chance you could give me a link to where I could find info. to implement?

Thanks again for your help, either way!

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

Here's an article from Google webmaster central with instructions on how to impliment it.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

And a quick example of implimentation by Yoast for 'Page 2' of results.

http://yoast.com/rel-next-prev-paginated-archives/

Just a quick note,  on 'page 1' there should be no rel=prev (your mysite.com/main-category in this case) On on the final page there should be no rel=next. All other pages should have both.

Hope these help.

[donford]

**if you want to see the next page, you click a crawlable link that goes to **

**mysite.com/main-category12-24 **

**The site does not offer a view all function. **

Would applying the rel canonical tag be appropriate in this instance, or do I have to let Google crawl and index each page independantly?

In this example you actually are talking about 2 different pages and in which case it can be appropriate to use the rel canonical.

Example take a look at a popular plateform like Oscommerce.

The Index.php page generates the following pages

• index.php
• category pages
• sub category pages

These are referenced by the software by the cPath (category Path) and would look much like this

• index.php
• index.php&cPath=1
• index.php&cPath=1_5

To a search engine these are all unique pages. Additionally, since many e-commerce platforms follow this type of module but also have ways to make the pages more SEO friendly you can in some cases access the same page via different URL's which is of course bad, due to duplicate content. In these case a rel canonical is very appropriate.

For example Oscommerce has a SEO friendly URL modification which turns the unspecific URL like index.php&cPath=1 into something like electronics.html However unless some sort of redirect is used you can actually access this page via either URL.

To simplify the answer the rel canonical tag is most appropriate for pages that generate dynamic URL's but content changes very little. In my examples above the pages are very different index.php and a index.php&cPath=1 page, however there can be times when you have interactions on those pages which would create a new url like say adding a product to the cart or a product selection filter, or any score of interactions that may change the url from index.php&cPath=1 to index.php&cPath=1&addToCart1&Product_ID=414&return in this case rel canonical would be very much appropriate as the page is not really changing you're just executing an action.

[Dr-Pete]

Technically, rel=prev/next is more appropriate, but it can be really tough to implement and Bing doesn't honor it.

If the paginated search pages don't have inbound links, you could just use META NOINDEX,FOLLOW on them (pages 2, 3, etc.). It's a lot easier to implement and is still very effective.

[Blenny]

Thanks!

Hadn't considered the robots tag like this. Unfortunately, our site's CMS system will make either of these options tough to actually implement. But it's great to know there're some options.

[Blenny]

Thanks! I understand what you're saying and I agree...this is exactly the method that our CMS generates these pages. The crawlable, additional pages are unique and should be crawled. This being said, from a search engine's perspective, the obvious "canonicalized" page should be the main category. I believe the robots, no index/follow is the best option for me - though I'm not exactly sure how to implement it with our CMS system.. Thanks.