Category page canonical tag

[crichardson9]

I know this question has been asked a few times on here but I'm looking for very specific advice.

Currently when you go to a category, say http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html, a canonical tag is added to the head of the page.

There are plenty of "variant" pages which carry the same tag, for example:

/range.html?p=2
/range.html?p=3
/range.html?dir=asc&order=price
/range.html?dir=asc&limit=all&order=price

Is it wise to push the "link juice" for each of these variant pages to the top level page? Or should each variant page have its own unique canonical tag?

After reading many blog posts, guides and papers I'm truly confused! Any general guidance or recommendations would be much appreciated.

Chris.

[CleverPhD]

Thanks DP for the input!

[Dr-Pete]

It's tricky. Practically, I tend to agree with Tom - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Especially at small-to-medium scale (let's say hundreds of URLs, but not thousands), rel=canonical is probably going to do the job here.

Technically, CleverPhd is correct that paginated content may be better served by rel=prev/next, and Google isn't fond of you canonical'ing to page 1 of search results. Their other preferred method is to canonical to a "View All" page (and make that page/link available to visitors), if that page loads reasonably and isn't huge.

In practice, they don't seem to penalized anyone for a canonical to page 1, and I know some mega-site SEOs who use rel=prev/next and have been almost completely unable to tell if it works (based on how Google still indexes and ranks the content). I think the critical thing is to keep most of these pages out of the index and avoid the duplicates. If your approach is working for now, my gut says to leave it alone.

[CleverPhD]

I would agree that use of the canonical tag is great, I would not say that it is the most optimal solution in this case as you have paginated results

http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

The use of rel next prev would be more appropriate in that case.  It has the advantage of also letting the link juice flow properly and it is what Google "expects" to see.

Now, if you wanted to be more conservative with this approach, you could add the meta noindex so that you also get all the other paginated pages out of the index, but this is an optional step.

One other thing to think about, if this is not a pagination issue, but this is more like a search result or resort of the same page, I would no follow links to those pages and noindex the resulting duplicates.  You have to think about crawl efficiency and if you are having Google crawl a bunch of thin pages that you are trying to canonical to a parent page, you are wasting Google's time.   Google will only spend so much time on a site spidering.   Do you want it to waste time spidering a ton of pages that dont matter?  Sure, the canonical would give Google all the right signals of what page goes where, but why would you want it to waste time doing that.  You would rather Google spend time on your most important pages and spidering and reindexing those.  Think about it, if you are going to ask a math savant to help you with your homework, are you going to have him/her spend time helping you with 1000 simple addition problems?  No!  You would go right to the more important/complex items.

http://searchengineland.com/how-i-think-crawl-budget-works-sort-of-59768

Anyway, hope this helps give you another perspective.  Someone will probably say, well, this only matters on larger sites etc.  I say no, it matters on all sites as you always want to have your best foot forward when the spiders come a crawling.

[TomRayner]

Hi Chris

First and foremost, in my mind you don't need to change a thing.  It's working well - and here's why:

Think of a canonical tag as an instruction to Google to treat that URL is the top dog, the be all and end all - the one that you want Google to index and rank.

Any other page or URL that has the same canonical tag on it is basically your way of saying - "see this page? Don't worry about that page, it's a variant of this page that might look the same. Ignore it and rank that other page!"

Now, why would you want to do this?  Well, if Google thinks that your website has duplicated content and it believes it is being done to manipulate or game the algorithm, it might hit you with a penalty (often a Panda penalty).

Ecommerce sites often have this problem with their product pages and, while not usually intentional, Google has been known to put penalties on these sites.

Your site, in my mind, counters all of these problems very well.

Google can and will index URLs with query strings on them (anything with a "?" after it) and treat them as separate pages.  That means, theoretically, Google would have tried to index all of these URLs of yours:

http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?p=2_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?p=3_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?dir=asc&order=price_
http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html_?dir=asc&limit=all&order=price_

Now this would be a problem, as you'd quite likely have similar looking pages being indexed where products appear in multiple URLs.  This duplicate content could lead to a penalty.

But that's where the canonical tag comes in and does a great job.  Your tag is telling Google "ignore all versions of the http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html URL with a ? on the end of it - that's just to help the user and I'm not trying to duplicate content to try and rank higher. Ignore them and treat http://www.bronterose.co.uk/range.html as the main page"

So you're avoiding the problem of duplicate content and your canonicalisation is working well.  Very well, in fact.  If you do a site search (check it out here) you will see that only one version of the URL has been indexed and noted by Google - and that's the canonical version.

So keep it just as it is in my eyes - it's set up very well indeed!

Hope this helps.