Canonical tag use for ecommerce product page detail

[amastone]

Hi,

I have a category page I want to rank. This page has 24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same.
I want to use canonical tag in any product to the parent category. 
Is this a right use of the canonical? 
Category page I'm talking about is : Finger bits

If I understand how to use canonical tags I can improve all my category pages.

thanks

marco

[LoganRay]

Marco,

Do not proceed with that task, it is not the proper way to use a canonical tag. If you put a canonical tag pointing a product to a category page, the product URL will eventually get removed from the index and therefore won't drive any traffic for product-specific queries.

You mentioned "24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same", is Moz flagging them as duplicates? If so, I'd recommend differentiating these products more. You could write more robust descriptions or add user-generated content such as reviews or Q&A.

[amastone]

Hi Logan,

thank you for your answer.
I will follow your suggestion.

But this is is really something I'm interesting in deeply understand.
If I have a category with many products
category1 with products' titles: cat1 p1, cat1 p2, cat1p3, cat1 p4,cat1 p5, cat1 p6..
category2 with products' titles: cat2 q1,cat2 q2,cat2 q3,cat2 q4,cat2 q5,cat2 q6,cat2 q7,cat2 q8,cat2 q9

I know that 90% of searches are for the "category keywords" because specific product title is so specific that has low volume search.

I want to avoid that these product pages are all of low authority because rank for the same long term keyword that is exactly the category. With a big effort I can write different descriptions but they will rank anyway all the the big hat keyword as well. isn't it.

I think this is one of the most common SEO issue for e-shops.

Any resources where I can learn more?
ciao

[LoganRay]

Even though your product titles have lower search volume, you still want to use your product detail pages as the preferred ranking URL for any product-specific query. This is where the benefit of long-tail keywords comes into play, you'll get a lot less traffic from them, but the quality (likelihood of them converting/purchasing) is much higher.

Take the 'Nicolai – 8th Wonder finger bit – Granite' for example. If I've done a Google search for that, my research is already done and I know exactly what I need. If I click on a result that takes me to a category page, that's not going to be as useful to me. But if the search result is for the product detail page, I'm landing on the exact page I want. It's got all the product info & specs I need, pricing, and most importantly, an Add to Cart button.

Hope that's helpful. For more info on ecomm SEO, I'd recommend taking a look at back through some of the Moz posts on the subject: https://moz.com/blog/category/e-commerce

[amastone]

Ok, thank you. now it's clear and it makes sense

take care
marco