Canonical for non-exist URL ?

[SEMTurkey]

Hi

I have a website what has parameter URL. For example

www.example.com/index.php?page_id=1&no=2

I want that search engine see my page URL as;

www.example.com/toys/cars

But this URL is not exist in my website. And when i externally enter this page it goes to 404 page.

If i add canonical url as www.example.com/toys/cars to the page www.example.com/index.php?page_id=1&no=2, what happened ? Is the url at the serp change as www.example.com/toys/cars ?

[Theo-NL]

It seems to me you're a bit confused between canonical URLs and URLs that have been rewritten. What a canonical URL does is telling the search engines what version of your URL is that canonical one, which can for example exclude some parameters. One the actual url www.example.org/special/?foo=bar&test=3 you can tell the search engines that www.example.org/special/ is your URL (and therefor the parameters foo and test will be ignored and won't create any duplicate content). But, these canonical URLs have to exist!

To create new URLs, you should either look if the CMS (Content Management System) you're using has the option to switch on static URLs (sometimes called SEF URLs). If you're using a custom system, or your CMS doesn't support static URLs, you can search google for terms such as: mod_rewrite, static urls php, htaccess url rewrite.