Canonical URL Question Involving Magento and Pagination

[vetofunk]

Hey Everyone,

I had a question about canonical urls. Recently we have this set up on our Magento site, as there are different parameter on each of our categories and brands. I have Google Webmaster Tools ignoring most of the parameters, but one.

The parameter I am keeping is the ?limit=all

I also have this set as the canonical url for all the brands and categories because my thought is that it shows all the products on a single page, especially when some of our brands have 50+ products. I thought that it might help with getting all the product pages spidered easily.

So it pretty much looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/category.html?limit=all" />

My question is if this is the best way to do it. Right now our brands and categories in the serps look like http://www.example.com/category.html and I also build links to the url like this.

Do you think there is any problem with having the canonical url different from the url I am building links to?

Thanks!

Jeff

[edited by: tedster at 4:30 pm (utc) on Jun 22, 2012]
[edit reason] switch to example.com so the URL will display [/edit]

[netmeg]

I oversee a Magento site for a client with about 2400 products, and we've had no problem getting products indexed. They don't *all* rank, but a lot of them do. I myself block pretty much every URL with a ? in it in robots.txt.

[tedster]

Do you think there is any problem with having the canonical url different from the url I am building links to?

If there is any potential problem it should be quite rare. The only issue I see with depending on the canonical link element is that the responsibility is completely on Google. It's always best to find solutions that are all something you can control 100%.

[vetofunk]

Nutmeg, so do you have Google spidering your deeper category pages as www.example.com/category-2.html or www.example.com/category.html?page=2 as an example?

[vetofunk]

So let's say I build up all my links to www.example.com/category.html, but I have that page and the additional pages in this category set to "http://www.example.com/category.html?limit=all", would this effect our positioning because it's a different url?

[netmeg]

(netmeg)

No, they don't spider the pagination. I think last time I looked we had all but about 20 pages in our sitemap indexed.

[vetofunk]

Does Google see the following pages as two different urls from a backlink perspective?

www.example.com/category.html
www.example.com/category.html?limit=all

Right now I have "www.example.com/category.html?limit=all" as the canonical url. Will doing this effect positioning?

Thanks

[g1smd]

Yes, they are two different URLs.

You can use rel='canonical' to point to the page that lists all of the content,

[aakk9999]

We do pretty much the same as netmeg - the first page is where links point to and subsequent pages are set as noindex. So Google would follow links on page 2 onwards to reach product pages, but would only index the first page of category listing.

[g1smd]

That's generally not a good idea I am led to believe.