Pagination solution
-
I'm using pagination following Google's guidelines to resolve duplication on pages such as:
Is it sufficient to apply rel="prev" and rel="next" to search results navigation or is it wise to apply a canonical tag on www.domain.be/product-overview/2/ to www.domain.be/product-overview/?
Many thanks for your insights!
-
Hi Dr. Pete. Thanks a lot for your additional expertise. I think I've got a pretty good understanding how to use canonicals and pagination with eachother. Thanks!
-
Just following up on Matthew's comment. The reason for the canonical to Page 2, in that example, is to cover any kind of additional duplicates, like sorts. For example, if you had URLs like:
...where those pages sorted by price or product rating. Then, you'd want to canonical all sorted versions to "/2". In that case, the rel=prev/next tags should actually include "/price" and "/rating", depending on which page you're currently on. It's a mess, honestly, and I'm not thrilled with Google's implementation, but it seems to work fairly well.
Bing's implementation is limited, unfortunately.
FYI, if there are no other duplicates (just pagination), you don't really need the canonical. It won't hurt you, but it's unnecessary.
-
Thanks THB for that additional explanation. Lessons learned! Many thanks.
-
Thanks Matthew. It's crystal clear to me now!
-
Not all web crawlers honour the rel="prev" and rel="next" attributes, but I always use them because they cannot harm you and are especially helpful for crawlers that do take them into consideration.
I made the mistake, ages ago, of placing the canonical tag on my pagination pages that pointed to the first page. I didn't have a firm grasp of the canonical tag at that time, and i paid the price for it. Now I find that the canonical tag is grossly over/misused as you don't even need to place it on any of the pagination pages. Google knows what page it's on and will usually just disregard the canonical tag. It will only take it into consideration if the URL and canonical tag don't match.
Make sure to change up your title/meta tags to accommodate the various pages, ie.
<title>Car Parts - Page 2/3/4/5/6/etc</title>
Adding a page reference to your <h>tags is not necessary as the content of the page is still the same, just another page.</h>
Consider adding the title attribute to your paging links as well as a notifier:
There are additional rel attribute values that can be helpful, too: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#type-links
-
Hi Jacob,
You do want to include a canonical on page 2 but you want the canonical to reference page 2. This confused me at first but the reason is that you want Google to see page 2 as something separate from page 1, but part of the same series as page 1, page 3, etc. So, for that page 2, your should have:
I look at it this way: the canonical says, page 2 is a page that Google can index but the prev/next links reminds Google that this page doesn't stand alone.
Here is more from Google. See the "A few points to mention:" section.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
I hope that helps. Thanks,
Matthew
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
-
How should one approach pagination on website
This is my first post here so forgive me if I made any mistake while posting it. Say I have one category called News on my website, it gets frequently updated with new posts everyday. So the thing is one article that is sitting on first page of the category, will eventually move down to 2nd page, and then 3rd and then 4th and so on. Now bots will see this article on first page, then index this on second page also and then on third also and so on and this goes on for rest of the articles as well. Will this raise a duplicate flag for the website. How should one approach this problem. I would really not want to use noindex tag here as I do want such pages to get indexed but without getting the duplicate content issue.
On-Page Optimization | | thetelescope1 -
Is it convinient to use No-Index, Follow to my Paginated Pages?
I have a website http://www.naukrigulf.com and it has a lot of Paginated pages on its SERP and most of paginated pages are getting indexed in Google SERP. Is it beneficial to use No-Index, Follow to keep the link equity to main (first page), although we have already used rel=next and rel=prev. If Answer is "yes" is their any harm by using no-index, follow with rel=next, rel=prev.
On-Page Optimization | | vivekrathore0 -
Paginated URLs are getting Indexed
Hi, For ex: - My site is www.abc.com and Its paginated URLs for www.abc.com/jobs-in-delhi are in the format of : www.abc.com/jobs-in-delhi-1, www.abc.com/jobs-in-delhi-2 and vice versa also i have used pagination tags rel=next and rel=prev. My concern is all the paginated URLs are getting indexed so is their any disadvantage if these URLs are getting indexed as somewhere i have read that link juice may get distributed in case of pagination. isn't it good to use Noindex, Follow so that we can make the Google to understand that paginated page are not so much important and that should not be ranked.
On-Page Optimization | | vivekrathore0 -
Help! A couple of basic questions on dup. content, pagination and tumblr blogs.
Hi, and many thanks in advance for any assistance. According to our GWMT we currently have over a thousand duplicated title tags and meta descriptions. These stem from tabs that we have located beneath the body copy, which when you click on them display offers or itineraries (we're a travel company). So the URLs change to having "?st=Offer" or "?st=Itinerary" at the end, and are considered to be duplicating the original page's title and meta des. Sometimes the original page is also paginated, and shows the same duplication errors. What would be the best way to ensure we're not duplicating anything? Also, we have a tumblr blog, where there's single page displaying all the blog content, but also links to each blog on a separate individual page. We would like to keep the individual pages as we can optimise to target specific keywords, but want to avoid any duplication issues again. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | LV70 -
Pagination on related content within a subject
A client has come to us with new content and sections for their site. The two main sections are "Widget Services" - the sales pages, and "Widget Guide" - a non-commercial guide to using the widgets etc. Both the Services and Guide pages contain the same pages (red widgets, blue widgets, triangle widgets), and - here's the problem - the same first paragraph. i.e. ======== Blue widget services Blue widgets were invented in 1906 by Professor Blue. It was only a coincidence that they were blue. We stock a full range of blue widgets, we were voted best blue widget handler at widgetcon 2013. Buy one now See our guide to blue widgets here Guide to blue widgets Blue widgets were invented in 1906 by Professor Blue. It was only a coincidence that they were blue. The thing about blue widgets as they're not at all like red widgets at all. For starters, they're blue. Find more information about our blue widgets here ======== In all of these pages, the first paragraph is ~200 words and provides a great introduction to the subject, and the rest of the page is 600-800 words, making these pages unique enough to justify being different pages. We want to deal with this by declaring each page as a paginated version of a two page article on each type of widget (using rel=prev/next). Our thinking is that Google probably handles introuctions/headers on paginated content in a sensible way. Has anyone experienced this before? Is there any issues on using rel="prev" and rel="next" when they're not strictly paginated?
On-Page Optimization | | BabelPR0 -
What if Paginated Pages all have PageRank?
Paginated Pages, page 2,3,4 etc.... they aren't supposed to have a PageRank, right? If they are only linked to from themselves, only the original page, Page 1, is supposed to be showing PageRank? I'm trying to double check that I am handling this right. I'm not using canonical, or noindex or any of that... just using rel next and prev, which I thought would be fine. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | MadeLoud0 -
How to handle Meta Tags on Pagination... page 2,3,4....
Seems that SEOMoz reports are considering my paginated pages as duplicate Meta Tags. For example, I have a product catalog with 5 paginated pages. Obviously the content on each page is unique and the URL ends in =4, =5 for the page number, but the Title and Description are the same for all the pages. Any suggestions on how to handle this? The pages other than page 1 are not indexed, so it should not be a big deal. But wondering if I should programatically ad the page number to the additional pages to show a difference?
On-Page Optimization | | paddlej0