'Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical', Critical Factor but appears correct on page

[rockethot]

Hi,

Trying to get the following page ranked unsuccessfully....

http://www.joules.com/en-GB/2/Collections-Quilted-Jackets/c01c02.r16.1

Instead a product page is being ranked, shown below....

http://www.joules.com/en-GB/Womens-Quilted-Jacket/Navy/M_HAMPTON/ProductDetail.raction

When I run the on page report card it advises that the Rel Canonical tag needs to point to that page, but we have checked and it looks to be doing that already.

Has anyone else had an issue like this?

Thanks,

Martin

[87ROB]

Hi Martin,

The page you are trying to get to rank - http://www.joules.com/en-GB/2/Collections-Quilted-Jackets/c01c02.r16.1 has a rel canonical tag pointing to http://www.joules.com/en-GB/2/Collections-Quilted-Jackets/c01c02.r10.1

This is telling a search engine to ignore the page you're trying to get indexed and index the URL ending r10.1

Robert.

[Ecreativeworks]

Well, to begin with those are different pages with different content, which is not the intended use of the rel=canonical tag. Rel=canonical is supposed to be for duplicate content, and if Google sees that the content is not duplicate it may decide to ignore it (and it should).

Secondly, your rel=canonical tag (on the page that is ranking) is pointing to the product page anyway (and it should). Specifically to:

[http://www.joules.com/en-GB/HAMPTON/Navy/M_HAMPTON/ProductDetail.raction](view-source:http://www.joules.com/en-GB/HAMPTON/Navy/M_HAMPTON/ProductDetail.raction)

It looks like your issue is just ranking signals, and rel=canonical doesn't come into play here. You might consider pulling short descriptions into the product listing on the category page to have more content to show Google, and getting more relevant links directly to the category page.