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So that's sort of my initial thought in using the rel=canonical tag for its stated purpose. But I know that Google is pretty liberal with its understanding (say in using rel=canonical for individual events in a series) of user intent.

So my example would be: if I had a gray washtub and a black washtub - two separate products because they have different dimensions, capacities, etc, I would want to point any value back to the category "washtub" where both these products are listed. Do you still think that would be frowned upon?

I'm working on a site that has around 500 product listings. This is for a rental company without any sort of ecommerce platform, so, there's no prices, no adding a product to a cart, etc. Also, there are no different sizing / color options for each product, so each product is the canonical version.

After some restructuring, we're starting to see a lot of 404s and just some general mess.

I have a couple of thoughts.

My first is to just noindex each product. We hardly get any direct traffic to an individual product page, and if they land anywhere related to products, it's usually a category page. If I noindex the products, I don't have to worry about the 404s.

My second is to implement the rel=canonical tag on each product to correspond to its primary category. While this is sort of liberal use of the canonical tag, I'm thinking that it could help drive more organic traffic to the category pages.

Does anyone have any insight or thoughts on this? Thank you very much!