Intra-linking to pages with a different Canonical url ?

[Ray-pp]

Hello Moz Community!

I'm hoping to get some advice around intra-linking practices and the benefits when a page that is being linked to has a different canonical tag than it's own URL. Confused? Allow me to elaborate.

Scenario:

Background: Ecommerce Company is trying to increase its organic ranking for key, broad terms in the cycling industry.

Ecommerce company is trying to rank its category pages for a main term. To help this, the company focusing on increasing the quality of its intra-linking structure (the links and anchor texts that link to another page within the site).

Example goal: to have it's Road Cassettes category page rank for 'Road Cassettes'

Company's 'cassettes' main category page is here: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/

And the company uses filtered navigation logic to drill down into 'road cassettes' specifically: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/?page_no=1&fq=ATR_RoadBiking:True

SEOs are instructed to include occasional links back to this page, with SEO friendly anchor text, to help strengthen it's authority for the main term.

The Issue / Question:

Main category URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/

Road Cassettes category URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/?page_no=1&fq=ATR_RoadBiking:True

Road Cassettes Canonical URL: /Components/Drivetrain/Cassettes/

The canonical URL of the filtered Road Cassettes category is its main category URL. Will Company be able to effectively rank its Road Cassettes category URL for 'Road Cassettes' if the canonical URL is the main category? Should the canonical URL not be the main category?

OR

Will increasing the intra-linking to the Road Cassettes URL help the main category URL rank for 'Road Cassettes' - by passing all it's authority?

[LesleyPaone]

Categorization is a difficult issue for ecommerce sites. You want to have enough categories so people can easily find products, but at the same time you do not want to risk a duplicate content penalty or a then content penalty, by being over categorized.

I think with the canonical url pointing to the no filtered page it will be next to impossible to rank the page. If you are looking for click throughs from organic sources, it should work, but from search engines I don't think it will.

The way I handled the issue with one of my clients might be something you could do and it would provide better results. In the ecommerce platform I use it has searches and filters as well. What I did with their shop was I created a module that would handle some searches and filters differently. Basically they could enter a term in the module, say christmas, and any searches or filters on the site for the exact match word would rewrite the term as a psuedo category. It is kind of hard to explain the logic, but it created a stub page, like in your case would be something like /drivetrain/road-cassettes where the cannocial url could be set to the page, the meta description, title, and on page category description could be different. But the page was not accessible through any category structure or any other way, just through the search and filters. Basically what you are creating is a landing page catered to search terms.

If this is done sparingly, there is no issue with it, if you go through and make 10k pages like this, you might get a penalty. What I did was take the top terms that had been searched in the site and used them as a list of what landing pages to make.

[Ray-pp]

Thanks for the thorough response! Ecommerce sure does add a level of complexity to the whole process.