: When to use canonical? Prepaid products of different values I have a webshop for different kind of prepaid cards. Every kind of prepaid card is also available in a different value. The product

@Vandalay111

The fact that these pages may be competing against each other is worrying. rel="canonical" will help you towards that. If you have 3 pages alike for example, and use this in 2 of them, only one will rank.

There's many different ways to go about product variations.

In my opinion, it would be better to list these 3 products all within one page, for example:

Page for product A with the option to purchase it with the 3 different values.

Take a look at this excellent post explaining how to go about these variations:
www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/ecommerce-seo-product-types-colors-sizes/29082012/

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@Candy875

Use rel=canonical when you have pages with small variations.
I have an eshop for rubber stamps and each stamp can have a different color. Selecting a different color changes the anchor link, which means that it is a slightly different url.

I would use rel=canonical in this instance - I really have a single page that has major value to the visitor, the color variation pages are not important enough for the visitor to rank in the search results.

I would recommend having a look at the official Google Webmasters help Youtube channel.

As for not ranking, that is probably a content issue. Look at the meta title, meta description, h1 and text of your product pages. Duplicate content may also be an issue - if your product description is copied from a larger site your content is not unique enough.

You should also post a sitemap to Google webmaster tools. Maybe Google has not indexed your pages yet - try using the fetch as Google tool

Try doing a "site:yoursite.com" Google search to see the list of your pages that Google has indexed so far.

You should also use Google data highlighter to tell Google which data is which.

You can try adding a few relevant and properly named (= relevant keywords in link) anchor links from other pages that rank well.

An interesting video from Google's Matt Smith about 301 vs rel=canonical

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@Alves908

...the product pages doesn't seem to rank in search engines.


Setting a rel="canonical" is unlikely to help your ranking if you aren't currently being ranked already.

Setting a rel="canonical" tag informs search engines which of the two (essentially duplicate) pages should appear in search engine results (SERPs). If you don't specify this then the search engines will decided for you... one or the other, which might not be the one you wanted.

If you have a preference as to which page (of two essentially duplicate - or very similar - pages) should appear in the SERPs then that is your canonical page and the other page should include a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the former.

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