One of my sites (alkydigger.net) is using an SEO company to help with their search engine rankings. They've done a second "Tech Audit" and I was hoping someone here could help me with a new of their recommendations.

Here is one I'm not sure how to deal with:

"We found that your canonicals are not set up properly. Your categories and product pages are canonicalizing to the main
categories and products rather than to themselves. We recommend pointing them back to themselves. We also
recommend pointing filtered or paginated pages back to the first page to avoid duplicate content."

What should I be changing within the pages to fix this?

Why not change the Titles & Descriptions for better ranking? Every page has the same Title & Description.

<title>Shopping cart and checkout for Alkydigger - Alkydigger</title>
<meta name="Description" content="Online store shopping cart and checkout for Alkydigger - Alkydigger" />

Mark
Responsive Design Deals Ecomm Plus - ASP 6.8
www.paradiseclothingco.com

quote:

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recommend pointing filtered or paginated pages back to the first page to avoid duplicate content

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Nonsense...
Your paginated pages show additional products... you do want those indexed, right?

Your SEO company does understand they are working on an eCommerce website I hope.

dbdave....unfortunately they do. This is what is says at the fop of that specific page:

Canonicals
help tell search engines that there is a
master version of a specific page. For example,
let’s say you have an e commerce site, and on one
of the pages, you sell shorts. The fifth page of
shorts should have a canonical that points back to
the first page of shorts.
By using canonicals, you are avoiding duplicate
content across multiple URLs.
Canonicals are used just by the search engines and
have no effect on user experience.

Then at the bottom of the page, under "Analyst Notes" it shows what I quoted in my first post.

I'm not sure what to tell them. I have found multiple odd things that they are suggesting. I hope my client isn't working with a company that doesn't know what they are doing. What would you do?

Page five will have a different set of shorts, with different descriptions, and product ID's, so I would say that page 5 is not the same as page 1. The content should not be identical.

Google has no problem understanding that pg= is another page (meaning a unique URL), and you can also go into google search console (formally google webmaster tools) and tell them the pg is unique content.