: What should the canonical URL be when users can filter on multiple categories at once? I'm totally revamping my site's URL structure and have now defined the following structure of URLs to prevent
I'm totally revamping my site's URL structure and have now defined the following structure of URLs to prevent duplicate content (in which the /c/ part in the URL determines that a country filter is applied) and each URL has the corresponding canonical URL (some I'm still not sure of and are marked with OR):
URL: /vendors/venues/c/usa/massachusetts
Canonical URL: /vendors/venues/c/usa/massachusetts
URL: /vendors/venues/c/usa/massachusetts/boston
Canonical URL: /vendors/venues/c/usa/massachusetts/boston
URL: /vendors/venues/c/usa/massachusetts/region-boston
Canonical URL: /vendors/venues/c/usa/massachusetts/boston
URL: /vendors/venues/beach/restaurants
Canonical URL: /vendors/venues/beach/restaurants OR /vendors/venues?
URL: /vendors/venues/beach/restaurants/c/usa/massachusetts/boston
Canonical URL: /vendors/venues/c/usa/massachusetts/boston OR /vendors/venues/beach/restaurants/c/usa/massachusetts/boston?
As you can see users are allowed to add multiple venue categories, in this case just beach and restaurant, but users can filter down using more than 20 venues categories. Venue category filters are added in front of the /c/ part in the URL.
Now my question is: is this the recommended and most logical URL structure and canonical URL approach? And for items 4 and 5 specifically, which canonical URL is recommended?
update 1
Regarding "venues for Boston vs Boston-region" (example 2 vs 3). When loading these URLs, the results on the first 10 pages are exactly the same, as I'm sorting by georadius from city center outwards. The first URL shows only venues in the city of Boston whereas the second has a greater radius to include more venues. I do not know on which page the results really start to differ, it might be page 11, or page 14 etc. Should I perhaps remove 1 of these URLs? Or what would be the canonical URL? I'm now thinking I should set the canonical URL of URL 3 to URL 2 (and omitting all pagenumbers in this canonical URL)
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Two pages should use the same canonical URL only if the contents of the pages are substantially the same.
In your case, it doesn't sound like any of your proposed pages will have the same content.
venues for Boston vs Boston-region. There will be some overlap, but won't the region page have many more on it? If users care enough about the distinction, then they care enough about the distinction to find it through search engines
A page about Boston beach restaurants sound very different than a page about Boston restaurants in general.
When users can filter by multiple categories at once, it is usually better not to let search engines crawl results with multiple filters applied. Users may be interested in "Italian restaurants in Boston", but there is going to be almost nobody searching for "Italian beach restaurants in Boston"
To create valuable rel=canonical designations:
Verify that most of the main text content of a duplicate page also
appears in the canonical page.
Check that rel=canonical is only specified once (if at all) and in
the of the page.
Check that rel=canonical points to an existent URL with good content
(i.e., not a 404, or worse, a soft 404).
Avoid specifying rel=canonical from landing or category pages to
featured articles as that will make the featured article the
preferred URL in search results.
More reading here.
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