Canonical on ecommerce site

[Gordian]

I have read tons of guides about canonical implementaiton but still am confused about how I should best use it. On my site with tens of thousands of urls and thousands of afiiliates and shopping networks sending traffic,  is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url. In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes? Is there a better way to handle this? Also is there any potential problems with rolling out the tag to all pages if they are simply refrencing themselves in the tag?

Thanks in advance.

[G-Force]

Hi Gordian,

I would say that the best way to implement the canonical tag is by not implementing it. You should always prefer using 301 redirects over rel canonical and what would be even better is to simply not having the same content on different URL.

I suggest you read this article from Paddy Moogan :
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/301-redirect-or-relcanonical-which-one-should-you-use

If you are tired of reading guides and articles and you want a direct answer to your question, I suggest your post more details about the specific problem you are trying to avoid with some url examples.

Best regards
Guillaume Voyer.

[StalkerB]

is it smart to simply add the tag to every page and redirect to the same url.

No. You'll end up with a mess of a site. See - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/catastrophic-canonicalization

In doing this would that solve the problem of a single page having many different entrances with different tracking codes?

As stated, no that wouldn't solve it, but this is the sort of thing canonicalization is for. If you can get to product A via site/colour/product-a and site/brand/product-a then the canonical tag is to tell search engines that both of these pages are the same and then you state which is the 'official' one. Same situation if you had site/brand/product-a?affiliate-id=12345.

Is there a better way to handle this?

Must be I assume that each page is it's own entry in your CMS, rather than there being an identical entry for each path into it. As you said each page should reference itself on the desired absolute URL (and not the one displayed), how you determine what that is and impliment it site wide though will depend on your CMS and require a bit of planning.

[Gordian]

Thanks for the response. I do not have any duplicate problems right now, but am looking into adding the canonical tag because it is required with things like rich snippets (via feed instead of code). So I felt if I had it on all product and cat pages then that way I could solve the problem of the having affiliate coded links attached going to the page as well.

Example.

www.widget.com/product?utm_medium=referral

is the same as

www.widget.com/product

so if the canonical tag was on www.widget.com/product then it would automatically canonicalize the www.widget.com/product?utm_medium=referral entrance.

Is that true or is my thinking off?

Thanks!

[StalkerB]

Yup, in theory.

I mean that's how it's supposed to be used, so if it was set up correctly that should be right

You can also tell Google to ignore parameters in Webmaster Tools under Site Configuration > Settings > Parameter Handling but only do this if you're confident it won't mess anything up. Canonical should be fine.

[G-Force]

Hi Gordian,

That's what I thought. If you simply want Google to ignore a URL parameter, you can go in  Webmaster Tool and select to ignore it.  You can do the same with Bing in their Webmaster Center at http://www.bing.com/webmaster/

If you are still worried, you could as well implement the canonical tag, but, of course, do it with caution so you don't end up losing all your rankings!

Best regards,
Guillaume Voyer.

[Gordian]

OK thank you both for your responses! I really appriciate the help!

[StalkerB]

Thumbs up and helpful answers always appreciated