End of last year I put all the similar ( lenght, color ) widgets together on one page with all the Information needed and a link to the widget itself.
The widget page has a canonical tag to the summary page.
It worked, Google found the widget on the summary page and showed it in the serps and rewrote the title to fit the query. The April 9 update changed all. The summary pages are gone, the widget pages are gone also. Google replaced them with brand single widget pages.
What annoyes me, is that the big brands have a summary page or a search page linking to the widget. But they do not set a canonical tag to the summary page. Yet all the similar widget from the brands are in the database. Every query with Color, lenght, etc. shows the single widget page ( or 3 in a row, Domain spamming). As if this is not enough, there a 2-3 major brands, all are on page #1 with multiple URLs in serps.
Has the canonical tag lost its importance?
Is it time to remove the canonical tag? AT last, i removed about 2.000 single widget pages that are not in database anymore with the canonical tag.
