Canonical use when dynamically placing items on "all products" page

[TomNYC]

Hi all,

We're trying to get our canonical situation straightened out. We have a section of our site with 100 product pages in it (in our case a city with hotels that we've reviewed), and we have a single page where we list them all out--an "all products" page called "all.html."

However, because we have 100 and that's a lot for a user to see at once, we plan to first show only 50 on "all.html." When the user scrolls down to the bottom, we use AJAX to place another 50 on the page (these come from another page called "more.html" and are placed onto "all.html"). So, as you scroll down from the front end, you see "all.html" with 100 listings.

We have other listings pages that are sorted and filtered subsets of this list with little or no unique content. Thus, we want to place a canonical on those pages.

Question: Should the canonical point to "all.html"? Would spiders get confused, because they see that all.html is only half the listings? Is it dangerous to dynamically place content on a page that's used as a canonical? Is this a non-issue?

Thanks,

Tom

[TomRayner]

Hi Tom

(Great name)

If you preference is to have the all.html page (and more.html page) indexed and potentially ranked, rather than the subset/filtered pages, then you should do just as you say.

It's worth double checking if your "more.html" page is being indexed as well (just paste the URL into a Google search bar).  If so, if you can point any of the subset pages to that one, if it is more accurate, then that's an option.  Google, when crawling the page, won't see the dynamically loaded content (at least I think - you can test this by pasting the URL into the SEO Browser, running a 'simple' analysis, and seeing what the Googlebot sees), so it might be wise to point the subset pages to the URL that it matches most closely.

If that isn't an option though, there won't be an issue with adding the canonicals to the subset pages to point to the all.html - even if the content isn't an exact match.  You're taking steps to prevent any duplicate indexation and Google will appreciate that.  Another idea, which is probably more robust, is to add the tag to the code in the HTML, if the listing pages physically exist and are not dynamically created with search queries.

Having said that, I do believe your solution would work fine. Hope this helps

[TomNYC]

Thanks for your answer, Tom. (great name!)

Will do.