E Commerce product page canonical and indexing + URL parameters

[PASSLtd]

Hi,

I'm having some issues on the best way to handle site structure. The technical side of SEO isn't my strong point so I thought I'd ask the question before I make the decision.

Two examples for you to look at.

This is a new site http://www.tester.co.uk/electrical/multimeters/digital.

By selecting another page to see more products you get this url string where/p/2. This page also has the canonical tag relating to this page and not the original page.

Now if say for example I exclude this parameter (where) in webmaster tools will I be stopping Google indexing the products on the other pages where/p/2, 3, 4 etc. and the same if I make the canonical point to multimeters/digital/ instead of multimeters/digital/where/p/2 etc.?

I have the same question applied to the older site http://www.pat-services.co.uk/digital-multimeters-26.html. which no longer has an canonical tags at all.

The only real difference is Google is indexing http://www.pat-services.co.uk/digital-multimeters-26.html?page=2 but not http://www.tester.co.uk/electrical/multimeters/digital/where/p/2

Thanks for help in advance

[Highland]

Canonicals don't prevent anyone from indexing the page. Canonicals let you select which duplicate pages show up in Google (as opposed to letting Google pick for you). If you want the page to never be indexed you can use a robots NOINDEX meta tag or a robots.txt file.

I don't know if I understand the rest of your question, tho. Are you asking if you should canonical your pagination to the main category landing page? If so, unless the content is clearly duplicate, I don't know that it will make a lot of difference. Remember, canonicals just shape what shows on your site. It could be advantageous to canonical your pagination but what if what I was searching for was on page 4? Could also hurt you if not done properly.

[Dr-Pete]

If you're not experiencing any serious problems and just want to prevent future issues, I'd probably use rel=prev/next here:

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

It was designed specifically for paginated content and won't block your link-juice flow to deeper pages. Google has in the past said you can canonical to the "View All", but don't canonical back to page one. I've heard mixed results on the "View All" technique.

One thing, though - you currently have all these pages NOINDEX,FOLLOW'ed, so it's kind of a moot point. What you could do is just lift the NOINDEX on page 1 of results and keep it for pages 2+. That may be your least risky move at this point.