Canonical URL's for interchangeable parameters

Question

I'm wondering how should I use canonical tags in such a case:

I compare two items, lets say shoe brands. So one of my pages look like this:

http://shoes.com/compare/adidas/vs/nike/

and another page :

http://shoes.com/compare/nike/vs/adidas/

Of course, 100% same content. I guess the alphabetical order makes sense, so probably I will use the first one.

But how about canonical tags? Will stating the first one as canonical work?

I'm asking this because all of the time, I have thought canonical url's in this form:

site.com/root/a/b/c

and the canonical is site.com/root/a/b or site.com/root/a

i.e., I thought that canonical URL's are only valid for themselves, and their "children" paths.

So in this, "sibling-like-path" case, will the canonical work?

Thanks for any help :)

Answer 1

Sure it will work,

You can consider any of the one link as canonical parent (Means original). and other one as duplicate.

If the url is different in parameter or its order is not an issue.

You can just point one url as its original, SEO Crawlers will identify that.

something like

<link href="http://shoes.com/compare/adidas/vs/nike/" rel="canonical" />

For this page.

http://shoes.com/compare/nike/vs/adidas/

You can also check the status with MOZ or any crawler