Pagination & SEO
-
I have the WP-Pagination plugin and I am wondering how to handle duplicate content issues and what's best for SEO.
My developer initially downloaded the plugin to speed up loading for the home page. Now my home page has 21 pages of paginated content. But the pagination continues with each of my categories as well.
Should I be placing a canonical reference to my home page, or category main page?
My site name is gracessweetlife (dot) com
-
Truthfully, implementing these tags properly is way too complex, and I'm not thrilled with Google for how this solution has been structured. Stuart's absolutely right, though - rel=prev/next aren't being used properly on the current site. If you're mid-redesign than probably best to do it right on the new site, as it's not a catastrophe.
-
Good Morning Stuart
Thank goodness, I'm not losing my mind, this is exactly what I thought and this is probably the reason why I am receiving rank on these paginated pages and probably the reason for duplicate content. I think I will approach the new designer/developer group about this and have them change it in the new design. I'm either not explaining it properly to my current developer or he's not understanding how it works. To his defence he did mention switching to the Yoast plugin in too. I am a bit fearful to change much of anything right now because I finally returned to search and I haven't completely recovered yet like I mentioned above plus from what I've read whenever you introduce a new design you could experience issues with rank. I'm hoping that won't be an issue but I don't want to muddy the waters either.
Thank you very much Stuart, you've been a great help!
-
Hi Grace,
It looks to me like the way your rel=next / prev has been implemented in the wrong way - what it looks like it is telling the search engines is that each of your category pages is actually part of a paginated series of pages, this isn't what it is designed for. What it should be is:
Homepage - http://gracessweetlife.com/
Should have a rel="next" on the link for Page 2 - so:
Page 2 - http://gracessweetlife.com/page/2/
Should have a rel="prev" for the link to the previous page (in this case the homepage - so:
and a rel="next" for the link to the next page:
And so on...
Hope that helps!
Stuart
-
Thank you so much for joining in. I am so confused now because this is the reply from my developer:
Hi Grace, below are views of a post and a page. You already have the prev, next and canonicalhere is a post
| |
| | <link <span>rel</link <span>='prev' title='Vanilla-Coconut Panna Cotta with Pomegranate Jelly' href=' />|
| | <link <span>rel</link <span>='next' title='Chocolate-Hazelnut Spritz Cookies' href=' ' /> |
| | <meta <span>name</meta <span>="generator" content="WordPress 3.4.1" /> |
| | <link <span>rel</link <span>='shortlink' href=' ' /> |
| | |
| | <meta <span>name</meta <span>="description" content="Martha Stewart's easy, foolproof Holiday Fudge. Chocolate Marshmallow Fudge and White Chocolate Fudge from one easy fudge recipe that takes only 10 minutes to make." /> |
| | <meta <span>name</meta <span>="keywords" content="easy holiday recipes, easy fudge recipes, easy chocolate fudge recipe, white chocolate fudge, homemade fudge recipe, simple fudge recipe, fudge candy recipes, white chocolate recipes, chocolate fudge recipes, dark chocolate fudge" /> |
| | <link <span>rel</link <span>="canonical" href=" " />
Here is a page<link<span>el</link<span>='prev'title='About'ref=' //>
<link <span>rel</link <span>='next' title='Photography' href=' ' /> <meta <span>name</meta <span>="generator" content="WordPress 3.4.1" /> <meta <span>name</meta <span>="description" content="A diverse list of cookbooks that contain simple quick recipes to more complicated gourmet recipes." /> <meta <span>name</meta <span>="keywords" content="cookbooks, celebrity chef cookbooks, easy recipes, gourmet recipes, cooking techniques, dessert cookbooks, how to cookbooks, ice cream cookbooks, gordon ramsay cookbooks, martha stewart cookbooks" /> <link <span>rel</link <span>="canonical" href="" />
I've removed the links because I'm not sure how links are handled here on the forum and if it's allowed. Can you still get a sense of the coding without the link to the pages?
|
|
-
I should also note that our tools don't handle rel=prev/next very well yet, so we're sometimes over-sensitive to duplicates. One you implement those tags, don't worry if it isn't immediately reflected in our crawl - something we're looking at going forward.
-
Unfortunately, I'm not a WordPress expert by a long shot, but I'm seeing what Stuart is seeing - no rel=prev/next. I think that probably is one of the safer bets these days. Your site isn't huge, but the paginated archives pages straight from the home page could dilute your index a bit and lessen the ability of your individual posts to rank well. I don't think it's a disaster, but testing out Joost's plugin probably is a good bet.
-
Hi Grace,
No worries, the update to the toolbar pagerank might not be exactly tomorrow so keep an eye on the blogs to see when people start to report it.
The Yoast plugin is definitely really good for SEO, but as I mentioned before don't break your blog to get it, although that said a competent wordpress developer should be able to handle it with no problems.
Good luck with SEO, the best thing to do is keep asking more questions! SEOMoz has some great content. If you are new maybe try one of the welcome webinars to see how to get the most out of it : http://www.seomoz.org/dp/welcome-webinars
Best wishes,
Stuart
-
Hi Stuart
I didn't realize the toolbar was only updated every few months, I'm assuming from the content in the link the next update should be tomorrow. The first post without rank is dated May 12. Makes more sense now. They are all indexed which is wonderful. I can't get over that the rel next and prev are not on the site because my developer insisted they were, hmm will have to look into this closer. I am going to talk to my new designer/developer team about switching to Yoast. The plugin appears to have a lot more functionality and I think I read in one of the SEOmoz posts that the gentleman that wrote the post switched as well. Looks like it may be the way to go. I wish I understood SEO more. I've joined SEOmoz in hopes that I can learn how to do keyword search, it's the one area that I am completely clueless. I am attaching keywords but I haven't a clue how to do it properly. Thank you so much for you help! I apologize for all the questions. All the best!
-
Hi Grace,
Firstly - it does look like you have the rel=canonical on your paginated pages but not the rel = next / prev as far as I can see. Rel=canonical is one way of dealing with paginated pages, however I have personally seen better results using rel = next / prev - so if you can get this set up that would be good, but don't break your site trying to do it. I'm afraid i'm no wordpress expert so I can't advise about moving between SEO plugins.
I would say though that rel = next / prev is more appropriate for paginated pages, as rel = canonical is saying the pages are largely the same content, which with paginated results they are generally not.
As far as having PR / DA / PA on the paginated pages that's not really an issue, a number of sites i've worked on with paginated pages show this and it's totally normal.
All in all I wouldn't worry too much about it - as Google say on that page " Paginated content exists throughout the web and we’ll continue to strive to give searchers the best result, regardless of the page’s rel=”next”/rel=”prev” HTML markup—or lack thereof." - they have to deal with paginated wordpress blogs all the time.
With regard to none of your posts getting an page rank since the change how long ago was this? If you are referring to toolbar pagerank then this is only updated every few months or so - see http://www.seroundtable.com/pagerank-update-may12-15097.html - the more important thing to check is to see if the posts are (a) in the index (which it looks like they are - http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fgracessweetlife.com&pws=0&hl=en&num=10#q=site:gracessweetlife.com&hl=en&tbo=1&pws=0&prmd=imvns&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:m&sa=X&ei=R8wXUIPLA8a20QWor4GwCw&ved=0CCgQpwUoBA&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=ddc48e83889475dd&biw=1680&bih=833) and (b) are getting any traffic from search engines in your analytics page ?
Hope that helps!
Stuart
-
Hi Stuart
Thank you Stuart. I spoke to my developer because I was concerned, I couldn't see where it was but he said it was in place. Stuart I watched this video by Google - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html. If I'm understanding correctly, rel & prev and canonical should be set up so all the rank goes to the main page, i.e. all the paginated content from my main page should be pointing to my main page, right? I'm noticing in the seomoz reports that each paginated page has rank, it shouldn't right? This will also eliminate the duplicate content, right?
I am presently using All In One SEO and I am terrified to switch because I've been using the Title, Description and Keywords religiously, will my data switch over to Yoast or do I need to add everything back in manually? I've been trying to find a way to pull a report with all my keyword data (to use to generate reports in SEOmoz but I haven't been able to find how to do it in WordPress. Plus if I do make the switch I want to have a backup of the keywords just in case anything goes wonky.
I should say I am in the middle of a site redesign and I am trying to get all the code up and in order before the new site goes live. I've just gone through the worst 3 months, one day all of my posts disappeared from search and it's take me all this time to get back into the search results. I think for the most part we found all the issues. My developer performed a bunch of plugin updates somewhere around the end of April beginning of May which set off a ton of issues. My developer was convinced I had been penalized by Google but I insisted that it couldn't be the issue because to be frank I haven't a clue how to do anything underhanded nor would I. I finally reached out to Google and they stated I hadn't been penalized. I think it had something to do with robots.txt and .htaccess. I'm just happy I reappear in results. (I hired my hosting company and the wonderful gentleman who created the WP htaccess Control plugin, Antonio helped me)The only thing that is still a mystery is why haven't any of my posts since that time earned any page rank, very odd. Hopefully with a little more time I will see some change, crawled pages have increased and Google is crawling quite regularly again. I fell out of search at the most inopportune time because my new cookbook hit the shelves in May. The blogosphere has been very supportive and I've had so many reviewing the book and linking to me but I think all of those links are lost because my issues were during the the time everyone is posting, do you think at some point Google will find those links?
-
Hi Grace,
Looking at the source code of your site it doesn't look like the rel=next / prev is on there, you do have a class="next" on one of your paginated links, but this isn't the same. There's more information on rel=next / prev and ways to deal with pagination on this google blog post:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
Like I said Yoast's wordpress plugin is very good for dealing with all these issues, so if you have a developer who setup the site, i'd speak to them about getting this installed.
Hope that helps!
Stuart
-
Hi Stuart
I believe my pages do have the rel=next and rel=prev but I think from the seomoz reports it appears the paginated content is ranked and I wondering if it's better for the main page to receive all the rank, am I making sense. This is all new to me and I'm trying to understand the best process for paginated content and also how to handle the duplicate content the pagination creates.
-
Hey Grace,
For paginated content there are also the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags to let the search engines know that the paginated pages are just that, paginated. Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin takes care of this as well as being generally awesome : http://yoast.com/rel-next-prev-paginated-archives/
Hope that helps!
Stuart
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
-
WordPress Themes and SEO
I am helping out a client with updating their website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cangelmarketer
The theme they currently have hasn't been updated in ages (I am going to guess years). Would there be a difference in updating to the most recent version of their theme and changing them to a completely different theme? Or because they update in the current theme is so large anyway, it won't make a difference in terms of SEO. The reason I ask is that they don't know their Themeforest details to log in and download the most recent version of the theme, so they would have to re-purchase it, and with the hosting, they have access to a range of themes includes in their package. Thanks0 -
How to solve JavaScript paginated content for SEO
In our blog listings page, we limit the number of blogs that can be seen on the page to 10. However, all of the blogs are loaded in the html of the page and page links are added to the bottom. Example page: https://tulanehealthcare.com/about/newsroom/ When a user clicks the next page, it simply filters the content on the same page for the next group of postings and displays these to the user. Nothing in the html or URL change. This is all done via JavaScript. So the question is, does Google consider this hidden content because all listings are in the html but the listings on page are limited to only a handful of them? Or is Googlebot smart enough to know that the content is being filtered by JavaScript pagination? If this is indeed a problem we have 2 possible solutions: not building the HTML for the next pages until you click on the 'next' page. adding parameters to the URL to show the content has changed. Any other solutions that would be better for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
New Subdomain SEO questions
I have a main site - mysite.com. I just created a subdomain - leadform.mysite.com I plan to use the leadform.mysite.com as a 1 page lead form only. I will link to leadform.mysite.com from mysite.com and also from other websites I own (myothersite.com etc.) - filtering all traffic to this form to capture leads. (Note - the leadform.mysite.com has CNAME to other server that hosts the backend of the form) My questions are: How should I link from mysite.com to leadform.mysite.com? With dofollow or nofollow? (mysite.com has 1000's of pages and would link from every page with "get a quote' type button) 2) How should I link from myothersite.com to leadform.mysite.com? With dofollow or nofollow? Any SEO risk linking to leadform.mysite.com from an outside domain? (myothersite.com has 1000's of pages and would link from every page with "get a quote' type button) Does it make sense to build links from outside sites to leadform.mysite.com directly to try to get that lead capture page to rank on it's own? 4) Does it make sense to link back from leadform.mysite.com back to mysite.com for seo value? With dofollow or nofollow? Thanks in advance for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leadforms0 -
How do I optimize dynamic content for SEO?
Hello, folks! I'm wondering how I optimize a site if it is built on a platform that works based on dynamic content. For example, the page pulls in certain information based on the information it has about the user. Not every user will see the same page. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Geonetric
Lindsey0 -
Related products & SEO
My company has a comprehensive set of historical images and text - hosted separately on a free museum site - it's currently displayed on our main site as an iframe. I realize the iframe brings no SEO juice to the site - but we are updating our site - and thinking of bringing the images and text to our site. I'm wondering if this could help or hurt us - the historical information is about "boat widgets" and we sell "car widgets" - could a lot of information about "boat widgets" dilute our "car widgets" seo ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasErb0 -
What do you think about SEO of big sites ?
Hi, I was doing some research of new huge sites for example carstory.com that have over million pages and i notice that many new sites have strong growing for number of keywords and then at some point everything start going down (Image of traffic drop attached) there are no major updates at this time but you can clearly see even on recent kewyords changes that this site start loosing keywords every day , so number of new keywords are much less that lost keywords. How would you explain it ? Is that at some point when site have more than X number of indexed pages then power of domain is not enough to keep all of them at the top and those keywords start dropping ? Please share you opinion and if you have any experience by yourself with huge sites. Thank You very appreciated 2LC3AxE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | logoderivv0 -
PRweb & PRnewswire
Hi Guys, Looking for thoughts on press release websites in terms of link value. Recent press releases on both these sites have recently appeared in OSE with DA's of 93/98 and PA's of 47/48 - great stuff. Given we can control anchor text and include links these are great opportunities to combine anchor text vs branded links, include citation and co-citations all from within the main body of the release too depending on the PR package you subscribe to. So are these link opps as valuable as they appear or could they be devalued based on the fact they are sat on these PR sites? Might Google view them as no more important than links from ezinearticles? Are they frowned on even more as they might be considered paid links? Further to this, if they aren't as high value as their DA/PA suggests then might an extra filter in OSE to account for this be useful? Interested to hear your thoughts
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lovealbatross
Cheers
James0 -
SEO from links in frames?
A site was considering linking to us. Their web page is delivered entirely via frames. Humans can see the links on the page, but it's not visible in source. I'm guessing it means Google can't detect the links, and there is no SEO effect, but I wanted to confirm. Here's the site: http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Example links are the Princeton Review and Kaplan on the right sidebar. Here's the source code: view-source:http://www.uofc-ulsa.tk/ Do those links have any SEO impact?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lighttable0