Canonical tag for categories

[Oby1KnOby]

Hello everyone! I was wondering if anyone can give me a hand with these rel="canonical" tag, as I'm not quite sure how to set them properly for my categories and tags in news articles.

Let's say I have a news piece
www.myseite.com/news-article/

This article has 2 categories which link to
www.myseite.com/categories/funny/
www.myseite.com/categories/lolcats/

How exactly should I use rel="canonical" in this particular case? A broad answer is much appreciated...

[tstolber]

If I understand correctly, it doesn't matter which categories the article (or any page) links to, its where this content is.

Lets say you have a news article that is available as follows
www.mysite.com/news-article/
and
www.mysite.com/article?id=85

If this is the same content then you would want them to both have a rel canonical tag - probably both to the news-article/ URL.

The canonical tag says which is the main or original content on your site.

[Oby1KnOby]

Dear Tstolber, the example that you have written doesn't actually suite my case, and I will explain why:

With categories and tags I can't put rel=canonicals on each tag because they all link to different articles.
Let's say I have an article about cats <- this would be the canonical article. I also have 3 tags for it
funny, lolcats, and animals - obviously I can't put rel=canonical on neither of them, because those tags will link to some other news pieces on the same topic. Do you see what I mean? So should I just put rel=canonical on all of my main news articles?

[Ann Smarty]

Maybe that's just me but I usually don't use rel=canonical unless I have absolutely no choice as I have no idea how good that tag is for crawling...

For categories, I prefer to use NOINDEX, FOLLOW or just NOINDEX (as follow is kind of default) meta tag. This prevents Google from indexing that page (as thus finding if it has dupe content issues or not) and allows Google to crawl links on that page (and thus find your articles).

[Oby1KnOby]

Anna Smarty are you talking about rel=nofollow, or is it something else?
I have also faced a problem where my pages with a particular tag rank higher than the source article! For example

I have a news article "Cats are going wild in February 2013" - I have a tag for that article called - wild cats.
Whenever I google the whole title by searching for "Cats are going wild in February 2013", one of the first things that comes up in results is my tag page "Mywebsite | Tags | wild cats" - which is not what I want google to see as more prioritised, than the source article. Basically when I search for the whole title I want to be able to find the direct link from google to that article, not to the tag or category that points to that article.

This is quite important, any assistance on that?

[Ann Smarty]

I am talking about Robots META tags that you place in the header: The Web Robots Pages
Sorry I wasn't clear enough

Your problem is very common, and the solution I am using is also pretty much traditional

If your blog is on Wordpress, there are plugins that add those meta tags: WordPress › WordPress SEO by Yoast « WordPress Plugins

[Oby1KnOby]

But that's the thing, I don't want google to noffolow and especially to noindex my pages. I just want to show to google that the tag pages have less priority than the main article. Is it possible to archive that with rel=canonical, or setting the right priority in the sitemap?

[samyakonline123]

If the URLs are changed due to inclusion in the categories, then you have to specify a single URL through the rel="canonical".
For example there can be three URLs:-

http://www.samyakonline.net/index.php
http://www.samyakonline.net/
http://samyakonline.net/

We need to specify the SE which is our main URL. We can specify like this.
<link href="http://www.samyakonline.net/" rel="canonical"/>
If we put the above tag in the head section of the site, then the "link juice" remains intact. It is not divided on the above 3 URLs.

[Ann Smarty]

But that's the thing, I don't want google to noffolow and especially to noindex my pages. I just want to show to google that the tag pages have less priority than the main article. Is it possible to archive that with rel=canonical, or setting the right priority in the sitemap?

So you want your tag pages to rank?
I don't have that much experience with canonical but I don't think it will allow them to rank either

[tstolber]

I think this is related to your internal link structuring and not a canonical issue, unless I am mis understanding the situation.

If you are concerned about the pages that your are linking to being in a particular category then it is not a canonical issue.
If you are concerned about several pages in different categories being about the same thing then it is a canonical issue.

Maybe I am not getting your situation?