Canonical tag

[KarlBantleman]

Hi all,

I have an ecommerce client and on the pages they have a drop down so customers can view via price, list etc. Natrurally I want a canonical tag on these pages, here's the question.

as they have different pages of products,  the canonical tag on http://www.thegreatgiftcompany.com/occassion/christmas#items-/occassion/christmas/page=7/?sort=price_asc,searchterm=,layout=grid,page=1 is to http://www.thegreatgiftcompany.com/occassion/christmas#items-/occassion/christmas/page=7.

now, because the page=7 is a duplicate of the main page, shouldn't the canonical just be to the main page rather than page=7? Even when there is a canonical tag on the /Christmas/page=7 to the /Christmas page?

hope that makes sense to everyone!

[intSchools]

For this example you should create a 'view all' page where all the content is listed in one single view. You should then point the canonical tag to the this page, so that all content is indexed.

If this is not possible, then you should use rel="prev" and rel="next" tags to show the relationship between each page when linking. Google can explain this better than me here!

[KarlBantleman]

Hi dan, thanks for the reply. We do have an /Christmas/_all page. Are you staying that all the canonicals should go to this structure? We build to the none /_all versions so wouldn't this have a negative effect on rankings?

[intSchools]

I tend to make the recommendation of having canonicals on paginated pages point to the view all page. The reason for this is that this page will contain all the results, so therefore there will not be any duplicates.

I also believe it is good user experience for people to have all content accessible immediately through infinite scrolling - they can then filter and order as they choose.

For yourexample I would canonical to the /all page.

[KarlBantleman]

Ok, brilliant. Thanks for your advice.

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, it gets messy. I think I'm on the same page as Dan, but just some clarification. The two "approved" options are:

(1) Canonical all of the paginated series, including filters, to the "View All" version. One warning - Google only recommends this if the view all page loads fast and isn't too huge (and that's just good advice for usability, too).

(2) Using rel=prev/next for the paginated series, but then rel=canonical to point the filtered version to the current page. It's a bit mess.

Here are two good posts on the subject, but I'm afraid they reveal just how messy it is and how much SEOs differ in opinion. No real-world solution is perfect, that I've found:

http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html

http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284

[KarlBantleman]

Thanks Peter, it's stumped me somewhat this. The site has JavaScript that loads the new pages so the user doesn't see it in the URL but the pages load in the back end and this is causing thousands of duplicate title and content issues. We don't have a view all page to canonical to and the page load speed is what had my worried that it wouldn't fix the problems

the website is www.thegreatgiftcompany.com - I'd be hugely grateful if you could have a look and let me know what you'd do. Really appreciate your time on this.

[Dr-Pete]

Oh, so the "Loading More" is basically JS, but Google is crawling it? It might be better if you could use AJAX style ("hash-bang") URLs, and try to keep Google from crawling that at all.

The other option would just be to block the "page=" parameter in Google Webmaster Tools. It's not always ideal (since it's Google-specific), but it might be your easiest bet here.

[KarlBantleman]

Yeah, So would you recommend using either of those options over the rel=next/prev?

[Dr-Pete]

I'm honestly not entirely sure how rel=prev/next would even be implemented in your current configuration. It would be very complex. My cut feeling is that GWT parameter handling might be a pretty safe first try.

[KarlBantleman]

Ok, thanks Peter, really appreciate the advice! Ill give that a go and see if that brings down the errors on the website.