Pagination and SEO: How do I fix it during search parameters?

[CommercePundit]

Today, I have watched very interesting video on YouTube about Pagination and SEO.

I have implemented pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev" on my paginated page. You can get more idea by visit following pages.

www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas

www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?p=2

www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?p=3

I have added NOINDEX FOLLOW attribute to page 2, page 3 and so on. There is simple question from my side. Can I remove NOINDEX FOLLOW attribute from paginated page or not?

I have big confusion & issues when paginated URLs contain search parameters. You can get more idea by visiting following URLs.

http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?dir=asc&order=name&p=2

http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?dir=asc&order=name&p=3

What is best suggestion for this kind of pages?

[Leighm]

Sorry for confusions. By search results I thought you might have been specifically talking about putting keywords into a site search and getting the results page. I've noindexed that page.

What you've said makes sense.

Thanks Peter.

[Leighm]

Yes, it's the latter instance that I was talking about.

Thanks Peter.

[Dr-Pete]

Unless I'm misunderstanding, I think of "search results" pretty broadly - and category pages would apply. Each category page is a set of links to products (patio umbrellas, in this case), right? If you're talking about something totally different, please elaborate, because I may be missing something.

[Leighm]

Thanks Peter.

Just to clarify: I'm not talking about search results pages. I'm talking about paginated category pages. I've honestly had a number of cases where sites have linked to those 2nd or 3rd pages. Weird, I know.

Anyway, it's only a few links so I'm not too concerned about it.

Cheers.

[Dr-Pete]

Sorry, my answer makes it sounds like link-juice would be completely cut-off, which isn't correct. If you have a NOINDEX,FOLLOW'ed path, some (most?) link-juice will travel down it. So, if there are links to Page 1 of search, and Pages 2-10 are NOINDEX,FOLLOW, then there are product pages, the product pages will get link juice.

I'm not 100% sure, though, what happens with links directly to NOINDEX,FOLLOW pages - I've heard some people suggest that it can disrupt link-juice flow. I suspect that may only be partial, but I've never seen much in the way of data.

[Leighm]

Hi Alan, that wasn't my understanding of how it worked. I thought the "follow" part in this only permitted the bots to literally follow those links to other pages, and no link juice passes through. Maybe I misunderstood that?

[AlanMosley]

As Dr pete stated that this is un-likely, but for arguments sake if you make the pages noindex,follow then the link juice would not be wasted.

[Dr-Pete]

Practically, I think people worry a bit too much about that, as it's very rare to get links to page 2+ of search results (people link to either the top-level pages or the deep, product pages). Theoretically, though, you're absolutely right.

[Leighm]

Thanks Peter. One other advantage I can think that the rel=prev/next has: if someone is looking at products on a site and they are on the 2nd or 3rd page, they might decide to link to the page. This will pass the link juice to that page (or collection of pages) whereas if the page was noindexed, it would be a wasted link.

Cheers,

[Dr-Pete]

I haven't had a lot of problems with NOINDEX, FOLLOW leaking link-juice (in that pages below it ranked), but it's nearly impossible to ever test it both ways and measure which is better. The theoretically advantages of rel=prev/next are:

(1) Less link-juice disruption, as you said.

(2) That Google can choose to rank a different page in the series (like page 3 of results) if that page is more applicable.

I think, honestly, that rel=prev/next was really designed more for paginated articles, which have similar META data but unique content. Paginated search is a bit messier.

[Leighm]

Thanks Peter. I hadn't seen Google's official advise on this. Having thought about it again, it does make more sense as I think it would be quite messy trying to get the rel next prev tags pointing to the non parameter urls. It's good to know that the canonical tag works in conjunction with these tags to point to the correct url.

I know it's easier to just no index those pages, but doesn't that mean you leak link juice that goes to those pages? Telling Google that they are a part of a series and having all that link juice combined into a single page should mean a more powerful page?

Thanks Peter.

[Dr-Pete]

Google's official advice is that rel=prev/next should include the additional parameters, but then you should rel-canonical to the non-parameterized URL for that individual page. Setting it up properly, unfortunately, is difficult and I feel that it's too confusing to be adopted by most sites.

You can META NOINDEX pages 2+ and sorts and see how it works, or you can also block parameters in Google Webmaster Tools (or tell them those parameters are for pagination). Unfortunately, the "right" answer often depends on the size of the site and the scope of the problem. In some cases, I've found that the by-the-book approach works fine, and in others we had to throw out Google's book and improvise. I wish I could tell you that there's a one-sized-fits-all answer, but there doesn't seem to be, in my experience.

[Dr-Pete]

When you say that you're not getting benefits, what do you mean, exactly? If you're not suffering from any particular indexation problems or something like Panda, you probably won't see much difference.

[CommercePundit]

Thanks for your valuable reply. I'm waiting for your next blog post on this subject. Because, I'm not getting enough benefits after implement on my website. I have added my comment on Google's official blog and send my issue to Maile Ohye. Let's see what happen on this issue?

[Dr-Pete]

I have to admit I have mixed feelings about Google's recent advice, because it's very complex (and they've oversimplified it), and it doesn't work well for all scenarios. If you're using this as prevention and don't have any major problems (like a Panda penalty), then I think rel=prev/next is a good bet here.

As Alan said, you should be able to remove the Meta Robots (NOINDEX), and that's probably sending a mixed signal to the crawlers.

For the sorts and other additional parameters, Google recommends you use rel-canonical to the root page. So, a URL like:

http://www.vistastores.com/patio-umbrellas?dir=asc&order=name&p=2

...would have the following tags on it...

In other words, canonicalize to page 2 (with no additional parameters) but then rel=prev/next should reflect the sorts and other parameters of the current URL.

This is the main problem I have with the approach - it's extremely complicated.

Meta Robots (NOINDEX) is very effective for keeping the search pages out of the index and avoiding duplication problems, and it's much easier to implement. The advantage of rel=prev/next is that your other pages (2, 3, etc.) could potentially rank if they're a better fit. For internal search, like product search, I find that's almost never a big issue. It's much more important for article pagination (Google doesn't make this distinction very well in any of their recent statements).

Also, as Alan said, it's approved to just canonical to a "View All" version, if you have one and it's linked/available for users. That can create a huge page, though, so you have to take usability and load times into account.

Sorry, it's very complex - I need to do a write-up on this, as I'm frustrated with Google on the subject. Honestly, I still tell some folks to use NOINDEX, because it's just simpler and it's very effective and preventing duplication problems. Rel=prev/next is more subtle, but it does seem to work, if you can implement it properly.

[AlanMosley]

I have to say i dont know.

i think in that case you should use the view all senario
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

[CommercePundit]

Good to know! And what case will happen If paginated pages will contain additional parameters which are explained by me in example?

[AlanMosley]

no, it works like a canonical tag, all 3 pages will be seen as one big page, under the url and title of page 1

[CommercePundit]

Here, I have big confusion. Page 2, Page 3 and so on have similar page title and meta description which is available on Page 1.

Will Google show me error about duplicate page title and meta description after remove NOINDEX FOLLOW?

[AlanMosley]

Yes remove the noindex follow.

all the content on all the pagneated pages will be awarded to one page, usellly page 1. but if you have a no index, then only the content on page one will be used to rank you.