: What should be the rel="canonical" tag in all these scenarios? I've couple of questions about rel=canonical since I'm getting little confused. I've a website that shows list of doctors. I want

@Sue5673885

This page(www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=All+Doctors) shows all the doctors without any filter. The rel=canonical is "www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=All+Doctors"


That's fine.


This page(www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists) shows all the dermatologists, it has doctors that appear on the page with all the doctors as well . The rel=canonical is "www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists"


That's fine.


This page(www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists&gender=Female) shows all female dermatologists. The rel=canonical is example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists

Google will only show the page for dermatologists in search result, not female dermatologists.


I'm also thinking of having a page with url example.com/Dermatologists to make it easy for people to type the out the url. For that page should I do a 301 redirect to example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists or do I need to have a rel canonical tag.


A 301 redirect or a canonical on example.com/Dermatologists would prevent it from being displayed in search results. The example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists would be displayed instead. That's not what you want.

If example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists was redirected or if a canonical was set to example.com/Dermatologists, then you would achieve what you want.


If a rel canonical, which one should it be? /?speciality=Dermatologists or /?speciality=All+Doctors.


/?speciality=Dermatologists (but see comment above)

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