I currently have a canonical tag pointing to a different url for single page categories on eCommerce site. Is this wrong ?

[PeteC12]

Hi Mozzers,

I have a query regarding canonical tags on my eCommerce site..

Basically on my category pages whereby I have more than 1 page, I currently use next/prev rel and also have a canonical tag pointing to the View all version of that page. This is believe is correct.(see example - http://goo.gl/2gz6LV

However, from looking at the view source on my other pages,  I have noticed I have canonical tags on all my category pages which are only a single page and these canonicaltag are pointing to a different url.

I enclose an example . Please advise

Category page - http://goo.gl/Pk4zYl

This is where the canonical tag points to  - http://goo.gl/EwKv26

Another example

Category Page - http://goo.gl/4gWTdD

This is where the canonical tag for that page points to http://goo.gl/qm4HV7

Should I either make sure that categories that are only 1 page , don't have a canonical tag at all ? or do I have a canonical tag on say every page on my website for safety pointing to the main url for that page. The later, I imagine would be a belt and braces approach but I don't want to screw up anything if it's not advised?

Please help/

Kind regards

Pete

[PeteC12]

Hello Paul ,

Many thanks for your assistance and comprehensive answer to solve this.

You raise some very valid points and something I hadn't picked up on - the fact that currently my internal structure is referencing urls which are not the same as what the canonical tag is set for. Asyou say, this is not a good thing..

Once again, thanks for your help to solve this. My developer is on the case now.

thanks

Pete

[CleverPhD]

Just to clarify what is happening here, I looked at your examples links and here is what I see.

Your website has a home page (e.g. homepage.com) and site wide links in navigation etc to various categories such as

http://www.website.com/category-keyword1/

http://www.website.com/category-keyword2/

http://www.website.com/category-keyword3/

As I look at these what I will call "original" category pages, they have canonical links that link to the following pages (note I do not see this on any of your product pages or other pages on the site)

<link rel="canonical" href="http: website.com="" category-keyword2="" limit:9999"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>

<link rel="canonical" href="http: website.com="" category-keyword3="" limit:9999"=""></link rel="canonical" href="http:>

The URLs with the limit:9999 also show a 200 if you visit them, are a duplicate page and canonical to themselves.

This is not good.  What you are telling Google is that for each of your "original" category pages that you link to extensively with your internal link structure, that the actual (aka canonical) page is the URL with the limit:9999.

I would say that you did not need the canonical to start with, but now that it is there, here is how you fix it.

1. on all the original category pages (i.e. http://www.website.com/category-keyword1/) you need to add a canonical to self.  Just update the canonical tag and remove the "limit:9999"    There is somewhere in your CMS that is doing this, you may need a dev to help.  You have to absolutely do this.

2. on all the limit:9999 pages you have 4 possible options that you can do.  I put these in order of preference with option a being your best approach, option b your second best, and so on.  Therefore, if you cannot do option a, then try option b, and so on.

a) 301 redirect the limit:9999 pages to the original category pages

b) set the canonical on the limit:9999 pages to the original category pages

c) 404 the limit:9999 pages

d) block the limit:9999 pages in robots.txt, but be careful that you do not block the original pages.  Search Console has a great robots.txt testing tool for figuring this out.

Good luck!