: Rel=canonical from product to category A website selling a medical book called "anatomy cihak" has 4 html pages - a category called "anatomy cihak" and three product categories for each book

@Alves908

With addition to PatomaS response.

Not only would using rel=canonical be incorrect but you could also cause serious SEO issues and maybe un-indexing of some webpages via google.

For example, you have a webpage a.com/abc and you have a webpage called a.com/adc

you put rel=canonical on a.com/abc pointing to a.com/adc and a.com/adc points to itself you are in effect telling search engines that a.com/abc is a duplicate copy of a.com/adc thus instead of getting penalised for duplicate content the search engine does not index the duplicate page. For a more in depth decription see here

In answering your question. You main page should be "anatomy cihak" however this would be the section and the other 3 are products (1,2,3) if you set your website out and lay this out correctly in a structured format google will pick this up. However, would it really be a bad thing for google to show the product when someone is looking for "anatomy cihak" surely this would create quicker sales as the customer is getting exactly what they are looking for? Use structured data and keep the title tags unique and let google decide which is more "relevant"

Vote Up Vote Down

@Welton855

The reason to use the rel=canonical shouldn't be the term users use to get to the site, but the content.

If each page has different content and/or different reason to exist, like index and content, then there is no need for canonical, even more, it's use would be incorrect, semantically speaking.

What you should do, for instance, is improve the product page and have a related section where you point to the other books. And of course to the main category. Also try to improve the category index page so it becomes relevant.

Update considering your comments

If a page is ranked higher that others, that means that itś content is more relevant to users than the other ones, although, the fact that is higher in ranking also generates a vicious cycle that is difficult to break. A popular page is going to attract more visitor, making it more popular and so on.

In any case, improve the content of each page as much as you can so each page can hold it's own ground on searches and ranking, don't try to change that artificially. If each page provides an accurate description of it's content, users will be able to determine which page they want to visit, and which book to buy.

Don't worry about the order they rank, in any case, worry about them ranking or not. And remember, the most important aspect is that users can find the right information.

Vote Up Vote Down