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I have a Rails application running on production server. And recently I implemented canonical URL on it as requested by higher order people. After implementing it I checked it some online checkers. This is what they are showing:

Page URL: https://example.com/search?category_id=metal-processing-and-machine-tool

Canonical URL: https://example.com/search

Result: CORRECT

Is this right? I am not quite convinced by the online checkers. Could somebody please explain me if this is right or wrong?

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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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    I was the one that had edited "search resuts page" into the title, and now I have edited that back out based on the chat.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    May 9, 2017 at 12:50

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