Choosing the right page for rel="canonical"

[jfmonfette]

I am wondering how you would choose which page to use as a canonical ?

All our articles sit in an article section and they are called in the url when linked from a particular category. Since some articles are in many categories, we may have several links for the same page.

My first idea was to put the one in the article category as the canonical, but I wonder if Google will lose the context of the page for it's ranking because it will not be in the proper category.

For exemple, this page in the article section : http://www.bdc.ca/en/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx

Same page in the Expand Your Sales > Going Global section :

http://www.bdc.ca/EN/advice_centre/expand_your_sales/going_global_or_international_markets/Pages/RelatedArticles.aspx?PATH=/EN/advice_centre/articles/Pages/exporting_entering.aspx

The second one has much more context related to it, like the breadcrumb is showing the path and the left menu is open at the right place.

For  this example, I would choose te second one, but some articles may be found in 2 or 3 categories.

If you could share your lights on this it would be very appreciated !

Thanks

[jfmonfette]

Thank you for your answer and suggestions. Google indexed the one without the context, but I think the one with context should be better.

301 redirect is not possible since we want the article to show up in other categories and keep the visitors in the section he was before the click.

[jesse-landry]

Hard to say really and I would judge on a case-by-case basis myself.

I would look at several factors, including: what search terms are bringing viewers to these pages, which pages viewers are landing on (from google) more frequently, etc.

My guess would be the latter URL would be bringing in a wider array of keywords due to the "expand your sales" and "going global international markets" portion of the URL, but I'd have to see GA to really know for certain and then check out the keyword tool to figure what terms are being searched more frequently.

Somebody else might have another way of looking at this, but that's how I'd go about it. I didn't actually look at the pages, but if it is feasible the best possible scenario would be to 301 one to the other..