What canonical makes sense in this particular situation?

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Hi Mozzers,

I am running into a situation where I am not sure what would be the canonical best practice.

I am working on an e-commerce site (magento)

Situation 1 :

site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/subcategory3/ is canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/

Situation 2:

if site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/  is canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/ wouldn't it make sense to have site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/subcategory3/ (situation1) canonicalized to site.com/category/subcategory/ instead of site.com/category/subcategory/subcategory2/ ? and if I am right would it hurt to have both situations 1 and 2 combined?

Thanks Guys!

[max.favilli]

Anything make sense if it make sense.

The only rule is what make sense from a duplicate content perspective. And you are not limited to rules based on category tree sub levels.

Just think about the content of each category (or family/group of categories) and what make sense to have in google index. What should go in google index is the target of the canonicalization, what doesn't matter to have in the index (because duplicate, because of ridiculous potential traffic, etc...) should have the meta canonical tag pointing to the canonical url. That's all.

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi,

You should avoid URL canonicalization chains just like you avoid redirect chains. If URL1, URL2, URL3 contain substantially similar or identical content and if you choose URL1 to be the canonical/preferred one then here is what you should ideally be doing:

URL 2 --> Canonicalized to URL1

URL 3 --> Canonicalized to URL1 and not to URL2

In this case, only URL1 will be in Google's index. Here you go for more:

http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

Check out point 9.

Best regards,

Devanur Rafi

[MonicaOConnor]

If you have more than on canonical on a page, Google will ignore them all. Pick the page that will be the canonical and add the same tag to the subsequent pages with duplicate content.

www.site.com = canonical

the canonical tag on all subsequent pages will be link link rel='canonical' href='www.site.com'

[Ideas-Money-Art]

Thank you Guys!