Cnnonical Issue! Plz Help

[ITRIX]

Hi,  I'm having this problem for one of my website, say www.abc.com. Certain information in the site is long and thus required to be put into several pages. For example, let say there is a section for the "List of Business Schools in Canada", this is a huge list and thus divided into several pages. The main URL is like this www.abc.com/business-schools/list-of-business-schools-in-canada.html  & after on its goes on like

www.abc.com/business-schools/list-of-business-schools-in-canada1.html

www.abc.com/business-schools/list-of-business-schools-in-canada2.html

www.abc.com/business-schools/list-of-business-schools-in-canada3.html   Etc.

Now as Google is considering these pages as canonical what should I do suppose do what with it? I've examine that rel="canonical" tag is used on every pages (canada1.html, canada2.html etc.) and the canonical URL is set to the main list-of-business-schools-in-canada.html page. So, why is that Google is picking this up as canonical? Have I made a mistake in placing the rel= canonical tag ? Please suggest.  Thanks in advance,

[Silver007A]

What is the message you are getting from Google exactly?

Canonical can refer to the www or non-www part of the url.

Here is Matt Cutts of Google's explanation-

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

You can set the www or non-www in htaccess and in Google Webmaster.

[AdamThompson]

I'm not sure I fully understand your query, but there is a specific markup you can use for pagination: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

[Dr-Pete]

Agreed - rel=prev/next is probably more appropriate here. Google prefers that you not rel-canonical a paginated series back to page 1. You are allowed to canonical to a "View All" version, but then they prefer you have a "View All" link for users as well. It depends a bit on how many pages we're talking about and if there are any options that complicate the URLs, like sorts and filters.

[ITRIX]

Thanks Dr. it really helped.