Yes, I will look into doing that on GWT.

Was a nice and useful chat indeed! Thank you again.

Yes, actually I could get rid of the lpg parameter (it wasn't really needed!), so now the tag definitions are (for the 3rd page of the Guitar index):

<LINK rel="<a class="attribute-value">next</a>" href="[http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=4](view-source:http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=4)"> <LINK rel="<a class="attribute-value">prev</a>" href="[http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=2](view-source:http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=2)"> <LINK rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=3](view-source:http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=3)">

Now, the only doubt I still have is to add or not add the noindex tag to the page when it is requested to be displayed in a different way (such as the "table view" or a different item display order). In my opinion, if I stick with the canonical tag I don't need a noindex directive. What do you think?

Mememax, after thinking I have some doubts though about what you have suggested.

Why I want to put a noindex tag to the page displaying the list in "table view" if I already have a canonical tag pointing to the "regular view" page? Wouldn't the canonical tag be enough for the purpose of telling that the "real" canonical page is the "regular view" version? I am asking this because if I want to apply a noindex tag to that kind of different view, I may want to do the same to the list displayed with a different order, and for any other different way of displaying the list, etc... hence just using the canonical tag would be appropriate, pointing always to the "regular list" view, no matter what kind of "filtering" or "different view' option is selected. What do you think?

In other words, I don't think I need to include a noindex tag for any different kind of view the user requests as long as I provide a canonical tag pointing to the regular view list.

Am I correct?

Yes, thank you Mememax, I agree with you 100%. That makes perfect sense and I will work on that tomorrow morning. I am eager to know Dr. Peter thoughts and confirmation.

On my side, I think I got it cleared-up now. Thank you very much again!

Thank you ! That makes sense now.

Please, have a look at the page below, I have modified the canonical tag as suggested:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=3&lpg=40

Is that correct?

Thank you again very much.

Thank you Peter, I guess you meant to have the "canonical" tag as last tag in your example above, and also the previous rel=next and rel=prev definitions should be inverted:

Am I correct? That makes sense. If so, I will update my site to reflect this.

Thank you for the link!

Thank you for your post, and I think you have just opened a doubt I had, and that's exactly what also concerned me.

Have a look at this typical category page of ours:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html

For that category pagination, I have implemented the rel=prev/next as suggested by Google, but being afraid to be penalized for duplicate content, I also put a canonical tag pointing at the first page of that index. Should I have put the canonical tag pointing to the page series itself?

Something like:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=2

for the second page instead of the general:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html

as I am currently doing?

Thanks!

Thank you very much, that makes perfect sense. In my case, I am talking exactly about paginated content, and that's probably why all pages are in the index despite they are canonicalized to point to the main page. So, I guess that even if you have thousands of paginated pages indexed (mine is a pretty big e-commerce website), that's not going to be an issue. Am I right?

Hello here,

here are my questions for you related to the canonical tag:

1. If I put online a new webpage with a canonical tag pointing to a different page, will this new page be indexed by Google and will I be able to find it in the index?

2. If instead I apply the canonical tag to a page already in the index, will this page be removed from the index?

Thank you in advance for any insights!

Fabrizio