Having google index canonicals but users using parameters - correct?

Having google index canonicals but users using parameters - correct? - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search, url-rewriting, canonical-url to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about Having google index canonicals but users using parameters - correct?.Problem :

I'm working on a site that has a search facility with multiple parameters that look up property listings. The possible parameters are:

City, Area, Building Type, Min. Bedrooms, Max Rental Price, Page Number, Sort Order.

The 'raw' url, without any rewriting would look something like this:

www.mysite.com/city=1&area=1&type=1&bedrooms=3&price=1000&page=3&sort=1

While you're using my site, it doesn't matter to me or to you what the URL looks like, so I think I'm happy to work with the so called 'dirty' URL.

It matters however, what Googlebot sees, so i'm planning to add a URL rewrite to allow access to pages like:

www.mysite.com/london/kensington/apartments

And then i'm planning to add canonicals to make sure that's the page that gets indexed - no matter what your bedroom / price preferences are, what page of results you're on or the order in which you want them to appear. The idea is that Google will only index fewer, higher quality 'view-all' pages, but users will be able to drill down and refine their results to get very specific.

The question however is whether or not this is a correct use of the canonical and whether it will lead to the desired effect?

EDIT

It doesn't matter if google indexes 'dirty' URLs with parameters (though it should index the clean one when theres one available). What really matters is that the site gets found when people conduct a relevant search. Having it above competitor sites is the idea, if they didn't have an SEO strategy.

Solution :

Canonical URLs are to be used when two different URLs can be used to pull up the same content. If your URL rewriting causes this to happen then canonical URLs will be necessary.

So if:

www.mysite.com/london/kensington/apartments

pulls up the same content as

www.mysite.com/city=london&area=kensington&typeapartments 

then you need canonical URLs

(That second example may not make sense but hopefully you get the idea).

UPDATE

If the only difference between two pages is the sort order of a metric or something similar you will need to use canonical URLs for those pages.

You could use a canonical reference on the page www.mysite.com/city=1&area=1&type=1&bedrooms=3&price=1000&page=3&sort=1 to point to www.mysite.com/london/kensington/apartments as the master page. However, there are a couple reasons why I wouldn't.

1. The content on www.mysite.com/city=1&area=1&type=1&bedrooms=3&price=1000&page=3&sort=1 is not usually an exact or even close match for the content on www.mysite.com/london/kensington/apartments.


2. Correctly mapping all of your search result pages to pages like this, www.mysite.com/london/kensington/apartments could become tricky or complex as your site grows.


3. There isn't necessarily any value in doing it. How will Google be able to find the page www.mysite.com/city=1&area=1&type=1&bedrooms=3&price=1000&page=3&sort=1? From what I understand, this page is only accessible as a result from an inside search and Google will not enter data combinations into your search forms to find out the links to these pages. Therefore, the only way pages like the this one will end up in Google crawl is if you put a direct link to them in your sitemap.xml file or on an href on a static link on your site, which I assume you won't be doing as there could be literally millions of combinations. That means the only links to a specific search result would have to come from an external site. In which case I would suggest adding this tag to all of your internal search result pages, <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />. This tag tells Google not to index the page but to follow all of the links on the page.

If the issue about seo, google-search, url-rewriting, canonical-url is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.