Canonical tag on categories

[BspeedN]

I cant figured this one out.. 

I have one category with page 1, 2, and 3 and all these are crawled and indexed by Google. 

Its only the original URL that should be found by Google, so i want to make a Canonical tag to the original URL. 

It's so easy in so many other CMS systems? Example SEO Yoast for Wordpress is easy to do it with.-.-

See the example of all three URLs here.(The first one is the only one that should be found by Google) 

[Vishal3]

Hey there,

In my sense adding canonical tag in your liquid theme will rectify.

Follow this steps:

Shopify adds the canonical URLs automatically, but sometimes the auto generated tags are pointing to the wrong URLs. You need to manually edit to the code to change the destination URL.

Step 1: Access the site code by going to the Themes section, then click Template Editor.

Step 2: Next, find the “theme.liquid” file by searching for theme in the search box, then clicking on the theme.liquid text. The result should look like this

Step 3: Search for the canonical code by using either cmd+F or ctrl+F and typing “canonical” in the search box. The canonical code should then be highlighted and it should look like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”{{ canonical_url }}” />

Step 4: Within the canonical tag, look at the part that says {{canonical_url}}. Shopify provides automatically and you will need to replace it if it isn’t correct.

[BspeedN]

Thanks for your reply! Maybe I need to explain it. In wordpress, you can Copy/Paste the canonical URL into the specific page. This you need to do on all pages where it's necessary. This can be done manually on each pages with the plug-in "SEO Yoast". It's easy and it works perfectly.

Here's the example where it goes wrong with.´shopify.(And maybe I have misunderstood something) But what you talk about, sounds like a global setting that will appear on those specific pages that need it. 

Heres my problem: 

If this Canonical function is the only way to fix it, can you maybe tell my where and what I should plug in the URL.

Hope you understand. 😮

[Hayden10]

You can add specific canonical links to collection pages dynamically via Google Tag Manager. 

1. Create a lookup table variable where you can specify the pages. The input is the page they land on and the output should be the collection you want that url to point to.
2. Create a custom html tag using this code. Being sure to add your lookup table:  link.href = '{{Your Lookup Table goes here}}': 

   <script>
    jQuery('linkn[rel="canonical"]').remove();
     var link = document.createElement('link'); 
    link.rel = 'canonical';
    link.href = '{{Cannonical URLS}}'; 
    jQuery('head') .appendChild(link);
   </script>

3. Create a trigger that fires on pages where your Lookup Table variable does not contain undefined - this way the tag only fires on the pages you specified in the Lookup Table.

The beauty of this method is that if you have to make any more changes you can simply add them to the lookup table and the tag will automatically start firing there to the specified collection.

[Neo_5678]

@jeniffer 

Here, OP knows what is canonical tag and its use. 
OP isn't looking for the defination! So read the question properly before posting anything!!!

[chrismlong63]

Hey BspeedN,

I work with a good number of large eCommerce sites, so I should be able to help! 

I know it sounds counter-intuitive but that's the proper implementation for paginated content. Essentially each page in the series should have a self-referential canonical tag. The canonical tag should not point to the first page of the series. This is confirmed by Google: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

It's OK if you're seeing pagination get indexed, that's pretty standard on eCommerce sites. If you're seeing a paginated URL (?page2) become the primary ranking page for a given query, than you might need to check things like internal linking structure.