I have a question about how to use canonical urls on an ecommerce site with a complex category structure.I have many products and they each sit in multiple categories. Each product can be accessed on multiple urls like:/first-category-name/product-name & /second-category-name/product-nameThey can all also be accessed via standard path like /products/product-nameThe reason for the category versions is we vary the recommendations for alternative products and colours depending on which category the user is browsing. For example, a single unisex product may have many colour alternatives but we would show different subsets of these on the two following urls:/a-manly-category-with-dark-colours/product-name & /a-girly-category-with-eight-shades-of-pink/product-nameOn /products/product-name all the alternatives are shown.The obvious solution (to me) to this was to add a canonical tag pointing all product pages to their /products/product-name version.However, it worries me that most of the links around the site will point to the duplicate versions and not the canonical target which could be sending Google mixed messages. Is this an issue I need to worry about or will it all be fine as long as I have the canonicals set up right?
Canonicalising to less linked URLs
seo;canonical url;best practices
This sounds to me like the exact case for which Google created the canonical tag.You have multiple URLs for the same content with only very minor differences.But you do have some differences that are important to users, so you can't just use redirects.You have a preferred URL where you would like users from search engines to land.Google recommends using the canonical tag to remove session ids.  In that case, Googlebot might never encounter URLs without a session-id in the wild.  All the canonical tags would point to much less linked content (never linked).