Need for a modified meta-description every page for paginated content?
-
I'm currently working on a site, where there url structure which is something like: www.domain.com/catagory?page=4. With ~15 results per page.
The pages all canonical to www.domain.com/catagory, with rel next and rel prev to www.domain.com/catagory?page=5 and www.domain.com/catagory?page=3
Webmaster tools flags these all as duplicate meta descriptions, So I wondered if there is value in appending the page number to the end of the description, (as we have with the title for the same reason) or if I am using a sub-optimal url structure.
Any advice?
-
We don't have a view all page(We found them so slow, so long, and with so meny links we had a notable improvement in rankings in general when switching to the quicker paginated versions). And other then the first page none of the other pages are currently in our site map.
I'm not entirely sure how that would stop gwt flagging it as a duplicate meta though. Less you imply to also no-index them.
-
Do you have "View All" as an option for your paginated pages? If not, you might consider it, and then just include the "View all" version of the page in your site map. Just a thought...
-
That scale of unique descriptions is well beyond our capacity. We're actually considering dropping the number of items per page too.
Thanks for the help.
-
Could ignore cause any problems? (such as pages that should/shouldn't be indexed) I was rather suprised to discover that using cannonical wasn't enough.
-
I believe appending the page number, for example: (Page 3 of 5) to the end of the meta description would suffice from SEOmoz's crawler's or GWT's perspective, however, the best would be to have the ability to create completely unique meta descriptions.
-
It sounds like you have canonical and rel next/prev setup correctly so you shouldn't worry about duplicate meta descriptions. You could add ?page= as a query string to "ignore" in WMT and then it will ignore those pages and you won't be getting any errors from duplicate meta's on those pages.
Hope this helps,
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
-
Home page duplicate content...
Hello all! I've just downloaded my first Moz crawl CSV and I noticed that the home page appears twice - one with an appending forward slash at the end: http://www.example.com
Technical SEO | | LiamMcArthur
http://www.example.com/ For any of my product and category pages that encounter this problem - it's automatically resolved with a canonical tag. Should I create the same canonical tag for my home page? rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com" />0 -
Home page indexed but not ranking...interior pages with thin content outrank home page??
I have a Joomla site with a home page that I can't get to rank for anything beyond the company name @ Google - the site works fine @ Bing and Yahoo. The interior pages will rank all day long but the home page never shows up in the results. I have checked the page code out in every tool that I know about and have had no luck....by all account it should be good to go...any thoughts/comments/help would be greatly appreciated. The site is http://www.selectivedesigns.com Thanks! Greg
Technical SEO | | DougHosmer0 -
Need help with home page on site
Hello! Thanks for reading in advance! I've got a relatively old site (12 year old domain) that has experienced a drop in rankings specifically for our home page. Some of the key terms that I'd assume we would rank well for are: "expedite us passport" According to SEOMOZ, our on page optimization receives a C for the termr. also, the root domain and page have decent links, etc. However; looking at Google (logged out and in incognito mode in chrome), a page on our site http://www.passportsandvisas.com/passport/index.asp ranks well and our HOME page isn't listed in the top 50 or 100. THis is the case for a lot of keywords we used to rank well for. I would have thought our home page would have at least outranked an internal page. Any thoughts would be very, very helpful!
Technical SEO | | santiago230 -
Local Search | Website Issue with Duplicate Content (97 pages)
Hi SEOmoz community. I have a unique situation where I’m evaluating a website that is trying to optimize better for local search and targeting 97 surrounding towns in his geographical location. What is unique about this situation is that he is ranking on the 1st and 2nd pages of the SERPs for his targeted keywords, has duplicate content on 97 pages to his site, and the search engines are still ranking the website. I ran the website’s url through SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool and it verified that it has duplicate content on 97 pages and has too many links (97) per page. Summary: Website has 97 duplicate pages representing each town, with each individual page listing and repeating all of the 97 surrounding towns, and each town is a link to a duplicate page. Question: I know eventually the site will not get indexed by the Search Engines and not sure the best way to resolve this problem – any advice?
Technical SEO | | ToddSEOBoston0 -
Why is there 4 lines in competitors meta description in SERP?
Hi there, I have noticed several sites now display 4 lines of meta description in Google. Has anyone else seen this? Any help would be appreciated...thoughts? Barry
Technical SEO | | HaymarketMediaGroupLtd0 -
Too many on page links for WP blog page
Hello, I have set my WP blog to a page so new posts go to that page making it the blog. On a SEOmoz campaign crawl, it says there are too many links on one page, so does this mean that as I am posting my blog posts to this page, the search engines are seeing the page as one page with links instead of the blog posts? I worry that if I continue to add more posts (which obviously I want to) the links will increase more and more, meaning that they will be discounted due to too many links. What can I do to rectify this? Many thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | mozUser14692366292850 -
Duplicate Page Content and Title for product pages. Is there a way to fix it?
We we're doing pretty good with our SEO, until we added product listing pages. The errors are mostly Duplicate Page Content/Title. e.g. Title: Masterpet | New Zealand Products MasterPet Product page1 MasterPet Product page2 Because the list of products are displayed on several pages, the crawler detects that these two URLs have the same title. From 0 Errors two weeks ago, to 14k+ errors. Is this something we could fix or bother fixing? Will our SERP ranking suffer because of this? Hoping someone could shed some light on this issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Peter.Huxley590 -
Canonical pagination content
Hello We have a large ecommerce site, as you are aware that ecommerce sites has canonical issues, I have read various sources on how best to practice canonical on ecommerce site but I am not sure yet.. My concert is pagination where I am on category product listing page.. the pagination will have all different product not same however the meta data will be same so should I make let's say page 2 or 3 to main category page or keep them as is to index those pages? Another issue is using filters, where I am on any page and I filter by price or manufacturer basically the page will be same so here It seems issue of duplicate content, so should I canonical to category page only for those result types? So basically If I let google crawl my pagination content and I only canonical those coming with filter search result that would be best practice? and would google webmaster parameter handling case would be helpful in this scenario ? Please feel free to ask in case you have any queries regards
Technical SEO | | CNMOnline28
Carl0