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<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/category/subcategory/example-product/product-id" />

I have a whole bunch of query string URLs (company products) that I have rewritten to friendly ones (such as that indicated above). At present, seems search engines are still seeing both versions, so I thought perhaps I should add the canonical tag to my preferred URL.

Incredibly, days and days of trolling god-knows-what web development resources on the internet has not clearly answered the question of "how" for me. Hoping someone here can help.

For the record, I am utilizing a single file (products1.php) to populate all of my products.

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products1.php simply needs to output the canonical link in the head section of the page. Presumably it knows the information needed to build your friendly URL:

  • category
  • subcategory
  • product name
  • product id

Then the canonical tag appears in both the page for the friendly URL and the page for the parameterized URL. That is fine. Google says that a canonical link that points to the current page would be OK.

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  • So then I would render the canonical link in the tag as: "example.com...""?? Nov 19, 2014 at 20:51
  • You would use the full friendly URL including http and the hostname Nov 19, 2014 at 21:05
  • But there's dozens of friendly URL's because I have dozens of products. I'm obviously dense, can you clarify? Nov 19, 2014 at 21:13
  • Since the page is dynamic the script would build the matching canonical url for the current product Nov 19, 2014 at 21:32

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