Should I use rel=canonical on similar product pages.

[Mark-Tillison]

Thank you Sir. I think we reached the same conclusion.

By the way, the it was a just a simple example of the page hierarchy - we're not doing Horror Books

[BlairKuhnen]

Dr. Pete,

I have a internal debate going and I was hoping you might be a tie breaker on rel=canonical vs noindex given these paginated pages and might be a good use case for others:

https://www.newhomesource.com/communityresults/market-269/citynamefilter-cedar-park

https://www.newhomesource.com/communityresults/market-269/citynamefilter-cedar-park/page-2

The individual list items are unique, but clearly want to rank for essentially the exact same terms.  Page titles, metas, copy about cit is the same.  Just the list elements are different, but not a 12 pack of pens, 24 pack etc.  Is this tricky or clear?

[Dr-Pete]

There's no perfect solution, but Google's advice is to use rel=prev/next. This looks like pretty classic pagination. Rel-canonical is a stronger signal, but it's generally going to keep pages 2+ from ranking.