Where to point Rel = Canonical?
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I have a client who is using the rel=canonical tag across their e-commerce site. Here is an example of how it is set up.
URLs
1. http://www.beautybrands.com/category/makeup/face/bronzer.do?nType=22. http://www.beautybrands.com/category/makeup/face/bronzer.doThe canonical tag points to the second URL. Both pages are indexed by Google.The first page has a higher page authority (most of the internal site links go to the first URL) than the second one. Should the page with the highest authority be the one that the canonical tag points to? Is there a better way to handle these situations? Does any authority get passed through the tag?Thanks!
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Absolutely
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Canonicals are fine, but you should always canonical the correct or main url. (The one being used in the navigation)
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That canonical is fine - they're essentially saying that all those pages are the same content - applies to all "Sort By" filters too - better to have the 2 URLs consolidated into one in the SERPs
.. btw, what's with all the whitespace characters in the source code? :S
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I would see if they could restructure their site so that the 2nd link was the actual link. (without type2). I don't see why they would have those parameters as the main category.
You really want the link architecture to flow with what your Canonical tags are saying.
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This is fine. Nothing to worry about. The link juice does get passed onto the canonical URL. There's a slight loss, but it's sort of like a 301.
This tag helps you avoid any duplicate content issues.
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