Pages canonicaled to another appearing before the canonical on google searches
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Hello,
When I do this google search, this page(amandine roses category) appears before the one it is canonical-ed to(this multi-product version of amandine roses).
This happens often with this multi-product template, where they don't rank as well as their category version(that are canonical to the multi-product version). Can someone maybe point us in the right direction on what the issue may be? What can be improved?
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Placing a canonical tag on a webpage that points to a different URL is a suggestion to Google that the page is the same or extremely similar to the page at the specified URL. It is a suggestion that Google might or might not honor.
The more similar the pages the more likely Google is to honor the canonical instructions. If the pages are not substantially similar, Google will likely ignore the canonical.
Your example pages are very different so Google is likely ignoring the canonical instructions.
When Google and other search engines first decided to use canonical tags they were not very picky with how people used them. More recently Google has become more picky and is ignoring lots of canonicals and even ignoring canonicals that they use to honor.