Canonical url with pagination
-
I would like to find out what is the standard approach for sections of the site with large number of records being displayed using pagination. They don't really contain the same content, but if title tag isn't changed it seem to process it as duplicate content where the parameter in the url indicating the next page is used.
For the time being I've added ' : Page 1' etc. at the end of the title tag for each separate page with the results, but is there a better way of doing it? Should I use the canonical url here pointing to the main page before pagination shows up in the url?
-
Moz crawls paginated pages even if you have added the rel="next" and rel="prev".
-
Does Moz manage crawling through Wordpress paginated posts (with tags rel="next" / "prev") ?
Since I divided long posts in two posts (page 1 and page 2) using "nextpage" feature in Wordpress, Moz shows duplicate title between page 1 and page 2. For example : https://captaincontrat.com/guide/societe-en-cours-de-formation/ and https://captaincontrat.com/guide/societe-en-cours-de-formation/2/
Thanks a lot
-
Thanks.
-
It does, although Google seems to be slightly less fond of it over time. Since I wrote my reply in March, rel=prev/next are actually beginning to be more effective. I've never seen any major issues with NOINDEX'ing pages 2+, though. In many cases, it's just a lot easier to implement.
The big issue this year is that Google sometimes just ignores deindexation signals. So, you really have to try it and see.
I'd also add that I'm talking about search pagination here, not article pagination. Rel=prev/next is a much better choice for article pagination, because the content is unique across pages. Indexing page 11 of search results isn't much of a benefit, in most cases.
-
Anyone use "no-index" and "follow" for page 2 , page 3 etc? Does this work?
-
So, I have to say that I'm actually upset about Google's recent recommendations, because they've presented them as if their simple and definitive, whereas they're actually very complicated to implement and don't always work very well. A couple of problems:
(1) Rel=prev/next is a fairly weak signal. If you're just trying to help the crawlers, it's fine. If you have issues with large-scale duplication (or have been hit with Panda), it's not a good fix, in my experience.
(2) Rel=prev/next isn't honored at all by Bing.
(3) It's actually really tough to code, especially their proposed Rel=prev/next + Rel=canonical solution.
There are a couple of other options:
(a) If you have a "View All" page (or if that's feasible without it being huge), you can rel-canonical to it from all of the paginated pages.
(b) You can META NOINDEX, FOLLOW pages 2+. I find that's a lot easier and usually more effective. Again, it depends on the severity of the problem and scope of the paginated content.
If you're not having problems and can manage the implementation, Rel=prev/next is a decent first step.
I should add that this is assuming you mean internal search results, and not content pagination (like paginated articles). With paginated search, the additional pages usually aren't a good search-user experience (Google visitors don't need to land on Page 11 of 17 of your search results), so I find that proactively managing them is a good thing. It really does depend a lot on the scope and the size of your index, though. This is a very complex issue that tends to get oversimplified.
-
These pages obviously contain different items and each page only shares the same title and meta tags.
Marcin - do you think that if I add the rel attribute that will solve the problem? Will the Moz reports actually pick it and won't mark it as Duplicate Content and Title?
-
Hi Sebastian,
actually, there's a very clean solution which is fully supported by Google - just use rel="next" and rel="prev" in your paginated links to indicate relationships between pages.
Here's a recent discussion of the best practices from Google itself, and here's another comment by Yoast (famous for his Wordpress SEO plugin).
Hope it helps.
-
I think this is going to depend on two things: 1. Your Site Structure and If you want those pages indexed.
Rand Fishkin - recommends for paginated results not to put the canonical tag pointing back to the top page, which I agree.
Site Structure
If the final pages can only be found by going through the paginated structure, you'll definitely want them followed. You'd only want to no-follow to prioritize your crawl rate, but not recommended unless you have multiple formats (see the article above).
Indexed
If the content is unique (usually blog content) and you are getting traffic to those pages from searches then it may be worthwhile to keep them indexed.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
URL Structure for a shopping website
I have a website which currently has a bad URL structure. I would like to change it. Proposed URL Structure: www.website.com www.website.com/category/ www.website.com/category/men/ www.website.com/category/men/jackets www.website.com/category/men/jackets/product-name Is it a good URL structure? I have seen some other website uses their product name right after their root domain. www.website.com/product-name I have also seen another structure which changes like below: www.website.com/womens-jackets/products www.website.com/mens-jackets/products Which is Good URL structure for SEO & users?
Web Design | | BBT-Digital0 -
Analytics year to year comparisons when Url extensions change?
We manage a website which we recently changed from Drupal to Word Press. In the change, we dropped a small part of the previous URLs - the end extension - .php For example /attractions-rates.php is now
Web Design | | Teamzig
/attractions-rates with no .php. We eliminated the .php to make the URL simpler. How is it possible (and easiest) to do a year to year comparison as Google sees the pages as different? They didn't for the first 8 days (we could see both) but now the pages with the .php extension shows zeros. The content of the page is exactly the same only the .php is different. We know we can manually go back to last year's reports and do side by side but that is time consuming. Hoping there is a filter or process we can use to gen a report? Thanks, Jim0 -
Regarding rel=canonical on duplicate pages on a shopping site... some direction, please.
Good morning, Moz community: My name is David, and I'm currently doing internet marketing for an online retailer of marine accessories. While many product pages and descriptions are unique, there are some that have the descriptions duplicated across many products. The advice commonly given is to leave one page as is / crawlable (probably best for one that is already ranking/indexed), and use rel=canonical on all duplicates. Any idea for direction on this? Do you think it is necessary? It will be a massive task. (also, one of the products that we rank highest for, we have tons of duplicate descriptions.... so... that is sort of like evidence against the idea?) Thanks!
Web Design | | DavidCiti0 -
Please help me articulate why broken pagination is bad for SEO...
Hi fellow Mozzers. I am in need of assistance. Pagination is and has been broken on the Website for which I do SEO in-house...and it's been broken for years. Here is an example: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/audio-technica This category has 122 products, broken down to display 24 at a time across paginated results. However, you will notice that once you enter pagination, all of the URLs become this: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher Even if you hit "Previous" or "Next" or your browser back button, the URL stays: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher I have tried to explain to stakeholders that this is a lost opportunity. That if a user or Google were to find that a particular paginated result contained a unique combination of products that might be more relevant to a searcher's search than the main page in the series, Google couldn't send the searcher to that page because it didn't have a unique URL. In addition, this non-unique URL most likely is bottle-necking the flow of page authority internally because it isn't unique. This is not to mention that 38% of our traffic in Google Analytics is being reported as coming from this page...a problem because this page could be one of several hundred on the site and we have no idea which one a visitor was actually looking at. How do I articulate the magnitude of this problem for SEO? Is there a way I can easily put it in dollars and cents for a business person who really thinks SEOs are a bunch of snake oil salesmen in the first place? Does anyone have any before and after case studies or quantifiable data that they would be willing to share with me (even privately) that can help me articulate better how important it is to address this problem. Even more, what can we hope to get out of fixing it? More traffic, more revenue, higher conversions? Can anyone help me go to the mat with a solid argument as to why pagination should be addressed?
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Multi-page articles, pagination, best practice...
A couple months ago we mitigated a 12-year-old site -- about 2,000 pages -- to WordPress.
Web Design | | jmueller0823
The transition was smooth (301 redirects), we haven't lost much search juice. We have about 75 multi-page articles (posts); we're using a plugin (Organize Series) to manage the pagination. On the old site, all of the pages in the series had the same title. I've since heard this is not a good SEO practice (duplicate titles). The url's were the same too, with a 'number' (designating the page number) appended to the title text. Here's my question: 1. Is there a best practice for titles & url's of multi-page articles? Let's say we have an article named: 'This is an Article' ... What if I name the pages like this:
-- This is an Article, Page 1
-- This is an Article, Page 2
-- This is an Article, Page 3 Is that a good idea? Or, should each page have a completely different title? Does it matter?
** I think for usability, the examples above are best; they give the reader context. What about url's ? Are these a good idea? /this-is-an-article-01, /this-is-an-article-02, and so on...
Does it matter? 2. I've read that maybe multi-page articles are not such a good idea -- from usability and SEO standpoints. We tend to limit our articles to about 800 words per page. So, is it better to publish 'long' articles instead of multi-page? Does it matter? I think I'm seeing a trend on content sites toward long, one-page articles. 3. Any other gotchas we should be aware of, related to SEO/ multi-page? Long post... we've gone back-and-forth on this a couple times and need to get this settled.
Thanks much! Jim0 -
Weird url backslashing action...
Hi guys this is more of a technical question. Has anyone seen this before in a url www.domain.com/\page\ i'm referring to the forward slash / followed by a backslash \ resulting in /\ Any idea why this happens?
Web Design | | Immanuel0 -
Image URL's and naming
We're re-platforming on Magento and wondering about our images. 1. Should I be concerned about 301 redirects for my images. 2. Is there a "best practice" path for images? or is just the name important? Right now, all our images are in /meta/images/sm or /lg or /xlg. Since we're re-platforming, we're wondering if we should change the urls. But, I'm assuming this would require all of them to have 301 redirects and with all the other redirects, I'm not sure this is really feasible. thanks for any suggestions on this.
Web Design | | centralvacuumstores0 -
301 Redirect ! Joomla Pages, Already ranking. ( just wanted to change the url
hey guys hope everyone had a new year. I am ranking for a page on my site that i want to ( not specifically move ), but just change the url name: It is too long i think and i want to move it from one portion of my architecture to another menu. I have never physically done a 301 redirect myself, always had someone do it for me. I wanted some pointers. Since it is a fairly new site 4 months old! What are my options. Do i need to 301 redirect the page, if i am changing the Structure and AI of my site, or can i just change the url as is and it will still get ranked? How do i keep that url put delete the page and redirect it ? Sorry its very simple but i wanted to get the communities help to continue on ! Best Wishes HAmpig
Web Design | | BizDetox0