What should be the rel="canonical" tag in all these scenarios?

Question

I've couple of questions about rel=canonical since I'm getting little confused.

I've a website that shows list of doctors. I want to know the rel canonical for each of the following webpages. So please correct me if anything of them is wrong

This page (www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=All+Doctors) shows all the doctors without any filter. The rel=canonical is "www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=All+Doctors"

This page (www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists) shows all the dermatologists, it has doctors that appear on the page with all the doctors as well . The rel=canonical is "www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists"

This page (www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists&gender=Female) shows all female dermatologists. The rel=canonical is www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists

I'm also thinking of having a page with URL www.example.com/Dermatologists to make it easy for people to type the out the URL. For that page should I do a 301 redirect to www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists or do I need to have a rel canonical tag? If a rel canonical, which one should it be? /?speciality=Dermatologists or /?speciality=All+Doctors?

Answer 1

This page(www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=All+Doctors) shows all the doctors without any filter. The rel=canonical is "www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=All+Doctors"

That's fine.

This page(www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists) shows all the dermatologists, it has doctors that appear on the page with all the doctors as well . The rel=canonical is "www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists"

That's fine.

This page(www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists&gender=Female) shows all female dermatologists. The rel=canonical is www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists

Google will only show the page for dermatologists in search result, not female dermatologists.

I'm also thinking of having a page with url www.example.com/Dermatologists to make it easy for people to type the out the url. For that page should I do a 301 redirect to www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists or do I need to have a rel canonical tag.

A 301 redirect or a canonical on www.example.com/Dermatologists would prevent it from being displayed in search results. The www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists would be displayed instead. That's not what you want.

If www.example.com/doclistings/?speciality=Dermatologists was redirected or if a canonical was set to www.example.com/Dermatologists, then you would achieve what you want.

If a rel canonical, which one should it be? /?speciality=Dermatologists or /?speciality=All+Doctors.

/?speciality=Dermatologists (but see comment above)