Tackling Potential Content Duplication Issues in Your WebStore

[zach]

@franclin_foping:

I feel like I have been clear in communicating what I was looking for since the very first post and am going around in circles. If this is not the case, then my apologies and I will try and be clearer one more time.

Per my original post:

@zach

I have 2 main questions:

1. How do I retrieve the base url for a category so I can just do an if(){ canonical link}
2. Is there a way to canonicalize my category pages to a single category page that shows ALL the products for that category?

I then went on to say:

@zach

My understanding from the above is a canonical tag is provided on the product pages, not the category pages, no? The {product[‘product_canonical_link’]} does seem to return a value on product pages, however, not category pages.

Currently our category pages (product lists) are paginated eg: “http://…/accessories/widgets/?page=1”, “?page=2”, etc.

Obviously it would be best practice to canonical tag these pages back to the originating category page.

However, I would Ideally like to do the following:

1. have a category page that lists ALL of the products in a said category (view all)
2. canonical tag all “?page=1,2,3,4,etc” paginated category pages to the view all page.

Initially I was trying to just tag it back to the primary category page as that would be acceptable, but even trying to do that I cannot seem to retrieve the category url variable I need for this.

I understand that the canonical tag provided is for the product page and not the category page. And that I am looking for a page to canonical the categories to such as a view all page. Even still, the very first question I asked was for the category base url eg: “page 1” or “www…com/category/” url and if there is a way to generate a view all page.

You then say

@franclin_foping

Hi @zach

As I said earlier, the canonical tag is supplied in all our pages if you followed the steps explained in this post.

the product[‘product_canonical_link’] is indeed the canonical url to be used on product pages for matrix items.

It would be very helpful if you could provide an example of a category page which doesn’t contain a canonical url at all.

Then finally I am told that the canonical link for the category is the same as the page in the category eg: page5 will be canonical tagged with page5…

A similar issue was posted in the spring by someone else here: Webmaster Tools Errors - #2 by david_acheson

But no solution was given, you went into their template and fixed it and referenced $this post.

1. How do i retrieve either the base category url for the said category(page1,2,3,4,5,6) to use as the canonical page. eg: /widgets?page=5 would provide a canonical url of …widgets/ or …/widgets?page=1
2. Is there a way to generate a view all page for categories so that I may canonicalize all of my page 1,2,3,4,5,6… to that page eg: widets?page=5 canonicalizes to widgets/ or best practices would be widgets/all

I would like to use canonical tags with a view all page rather than next and prev as it is considered a more definitive solution with less likelihood of issues and will provide a potential increase in usability.

However If the above cannot be accomodated, my next question would be:

1. how do I retrieve the prev and next url’s using nitroscript?
2. What variables do I check against to determine if there IS a next or prev? Are they bool, strings, eg will they return null/true/int to an if(category[next_page]){echo ‘…link…’;}

Could you please provide a code example?

Thanks!