Tackling Potential Content Duplication Issues in Your WebStore

@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:

I then went on to say:

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

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!