Who's doing canonical tags right, The Gap or Kohls?

[DA2013]

Hi Moz,

I'm working on an ecommerce site with categories, filter options, and sort options – teacherexpress.scholastic.com.

Should I have canonical tags from all filter and sort options point to the category page like gap.com and llbean.com? or have all sort options point to the filtered page URL like kohls.com?

I was under the impression that to use a canonical tag, the pages have to have the same content, meaning that Gap and L.L. Bean would be using canonical tags incorrectly. Using a filter changes the content, whereas using a sort option just changes the order.

What would be the best way to deal with duplicate content for this site?

Thanks for reading!

[NBGnetworks]

Hi Daniel,

You are correct using canonical's is for content that is the same or very close to the same. Here's a good video from google themselves if you have 20 minutes to spare https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

-Nick