: Is it correct to have a canonical URL for a product category page that removes the category id parameter? I have a Rails application running on production server. And recently I implemented

@Ogunnowo487

OP: That url is generated when a link saying Metal Processing and Machine tool is clicked. And it contains all the machines under that category.

ME: So, it's not really a "search results page" at all and is part of your site navigation / hierarchy?

OP: yes


After some discussion in chat it would seem that this is not a search results page after all (despite the "search result page" text in the title and search being part of the URL). In which case it probably should be crawled and indexed, so the canonical tag suggestion is not correct in this instance it seems.

Just to echo what Stephen was saying in comments... IF this was an arbitrary search results page (that accepts arbitrary input from the user) then you don't want it indexed or even crawled (Google recommendation and would waste bandwidth etc.). In this case, a canonical tag would not be enough, and it should be blocked in robots.txt - since you wouldn't even want the search engine bot to crawl the page in the first place.

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