Duplicate Content, Campaign Explorer & Rel Canonical

[eric_since1910.com]

Google Advises to use Rel Canonical URL's to advise them which page with similiar information is more relevant.

You are supposed to put a rel canonical on the non-preferred pages to point back to the desired page.

How do you handle this with a product catalog using ajax, where the additional pages do not exist?  An example would be:

<colgroup><col width="470"></colgroup>
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.com/productcategory.aspx?page=1

/productcategory.aspx?page=2

/productcategory.aspx?page=3

/productcategory.aspx?page=4

The page=1,2,3 and 4 do not physically exist, they are simply referencing additional products

I have rel canonical urls' on the main page www.examplesite.com/productcategory.aspx, but I am not 100% sure this is correct or how else it could be handled.

Any Ideas Pro mozzers?

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[Davenport-Tractor]

Hoping for the extra points here, so here goes how we handled the problem.

The solution is a lot simpler than all the thought needed, or used by us to rationalize the answer, and it has been working beautifully. Our Google webmaster tools show constant improvement weekly without us doing any additional work.

We Canonicalized the first paginated results. ".com/productcategory.aspx" not ".com/productcategory.aspx?page=1" so now all pages link their juice back to the main page ".com/productcategory.aspx". GWT doesn't even care about setting the parameter "Page=" And we didn't include the Canonical tag for the product pages, because each product has its own link juice that we want to preserve, so that each product may "Star" as its own as a google result.

So all we did was to include a single canonical tag for the paginated category page and wala the hole solution works in GWT.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Christian,

It's likely a setting in the Platinum SEO plugin related to canonical URLs. The notice from SEOmoz is just a notice letting you know they are there, and not an error.

If you have specific questions (like if your plugin and template is set up correctly), I suggest starting a new question thread and including your site's URL.

[ccare723]

Hi! I have no idea what any of this means. I have "14 rel canonical urls" and I have never entered a "rel canonical url" on on any of my templates (are you talking about the css?)

I use "platinum seo" plugin and the sites that have the most of these errors seem to be the ones I'm using the "Socrates" template.

Help!

[KeriMorgret]

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

[elephantseo]

Damien,

I guess I was not very clear; basically I am suggesting the same thing as you in that you would use the same variable that stores the URL to pull in the canonical URL.

[krissy-cca]

@elephantseo Would that not just point every product page to one URL if using one template?

Could you not add the canonical tag exactly the same way as you would add a unique Title or Description (that's if you have the ability for that)?

You'd have to have a database entry and when one of the particular pages loads you'd pull the desired canonical tag from the database for that 'page'.

EDIT - If you create a seperate template for each type of product then go with the template canonical URL

[elephantseo]

Add the rel canonical to your template so that whenever the ajax creates the new URL it already has the rel canonical pointing to the preferred page.