E-commerce Canonicalisation Matrix
A written rule set stating which URL each type of page should declare as canonical, so that decisions are consistent across a large catalogue.
Analogy Mental model
A family agreement about which branch keeps its own revenue and which temporary stall must attribute everything back to the main shop.
In practice What you actually do
Write it down and circulate it. Category pages reference themselves; paginated pages reference themselves; sorting and low-value filter parameters reference the clean category; variant parameters reference the parent product; promoted attribute pages reference themselves and belong in the sitemap.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
One rule overrides all others: never place an exclusion directive and a canonical pointing elsewhere on the same page. They contradict each other, and the instruction to pass value is the one that gets ignored.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →