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lol.  Thanks!  That solved it. Amazing.

Thank you for clarifying!

.../category-green/some-product.html .../category-brand/some-product.html .../category-widget/some-product.html .../some-product.html clean URL should exist and the canonical tag within the top three URLs should be pointing to this clean product URL. The 3 above can be crawled and indexed, but the canonical is assisting Google in understanding which is the correct product URL.  A product can rightly exist in multiple categories. If the platform is such that a clean product URL is not possible (urghh!), then a strategy needs to be developed to choose one of the category/product URLs as the canonical. My preference though is to have a category structure and all product links coming from those category pages are clean product URLs in the first place, with self referencing canonicals.

Thank you!