Question regarding the canonical tag

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Micah Fisher-Kirshner: Re: second question. In the admin settings you can tell GA to ignore the `e` parameter going forward. That`s assuming that the urls above are either the same with show and not one show and the other shows
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  Alan Bleiweiss: I`d want to know what the parameter is for - is it, in fact, to retrieve unique information? To filter down a larger set of content or data? A way to sort content? Pagination? Determining what it`s for is critical to determining what the best course of actions are. And filtering out data in GA would cause you to lose any understanding of visits to the page when that parameter is activated, so that may not be the best option if you care about those visits.
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  Steve Wiideman: I took a look at the website and have the following canonical suggestions: 1. Don`t create a page if the criteria doesn`t have a match. Instead, simply notify the user in-line after the query that there is no match. 2. Like Alan Bleiweiss suggested, if you do have parameters that are not just for sorting results, consider dynamically modifying the title, meta, and heading to include the attributes that make the page different. 3. Always try to have your internal links be the canonical URL. I get that a drop-down option on a product page might change a URL, such as choosing a color, just make your best effort to make sure href tags use URLs that return a 200 "okay" browser response to create a more efficient crawl experience. More info: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
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  Kyle Hawk: Thank you both for commenting. I guess I did forget to tell you what it`s for! The "e" parameter let`s the page know that an exact match to the search query has not been found. So essentially, all that parameter does is tell the page whether or not to display a message that says "Hey, we couldn`t find an exact match to what you are looking for." Other than that, the page stays the same. Does that answer your question?