Pagination, Canonical Tag & Best Practices
-
I have an eCommerce site that dynamically creates category pages, which produce canonical tags in the header. For multiple page categories, it adds the page number to the URL. For example, this category has 3 pages....
Because most categories have too many products, I can't follow Googles suggestion of creating a "view all" page. Furthermore since all these pages use the same template, I'm unable to insert a NOINDEX tag in all the pages after the first page. Also, in this scenario, I'm unable to insert the discreet code for Next/Previous, which is also suggested by Google.
My only option for maintaining these dynamically generated category pages would be to hardcode the first conical tag in the template, which would then be produced on all subsequent paginated pages.
Consequently, every paginated page in this category would have the same canonical tag pointing to the first page. Would this incur the wrath of Google and would I'd be better off leaving the pagination they way it is?
-
PDG-Commerce
-
Yes it doesn't surprise me you'd be having problems on those higher page categories. Testing is always the way to go when in doubt. Out of curiosity, what e-commerce system are you using?
-
Thanks for your insight Marty. What I've discovered, that categores with the most pages, are the ones most adversely affected. For instance, if a category has 20 pages, it ranks horribly, whereas a category with only 1 to 3 pages does good. Consequently, I think I'm running into a duplication threshold penalty on the larger categories. Figure since I have nothing to lose, I may try hard coding on a couple of the 20+ page categories and sees what happens.
-
Greetings alrockn!
You do have quite the dilemma here. I actually think you will have problems if you leave it all as-is; you're between a rock and a hard place!
Most e-commerce programs do a terrible job on the technical SEO front out of the box and require some degree of customization to get it all straightened out. The pagination of category pages is a very common problem. I will take your word for it that you cannot modify your template(s) but any reasonable suggestion I think is going to require some degree of template modification.
The problem you're most likely going to run into is a thin content issue on your category pages. I'm assuming all of those paginated page versions would also have the same category description (if any) and if there is nothing unique about your main page Google is likely to ignore it.
To address your question on hard coding the first page as the canonical, I think that is really the only option you have. You'll want to make sure that category page does have some level of unique content on it (ie: category description text) so it is unique enough to attract Google's attention.
Could you not do some conditional coding to check the page version and modify the canonical accordingly?
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
-
Why Would My Page Have a Higher PA and DA, Links & On-Page Grade & Still Not Rank?
The Search Term is "Alcohol Ink" and our client has a better page authority, domain authority, links to the page, and on-page grade than those in the SERP for spaces 5-10 and we're not even ranked in the top 51+ according to Moz's tracker. The only difference I can see is that our URL doesn't use the exact text like some of the 5-10 do. However, regardless of this, our on-page grade is significantly higher than the rest of them. The one thing I found was that there were two links to the page (that we never asked for) that had a spam score in the low 20's and another in the low 30's. Does anyone have any recommendations on how to maybe get around this? Certainly, a content campaign and linking campaign around this could also help but I'm kind of scratching my head. The client is reputable, with a solid domain age and well recognized in the space so it's not like it's a noob trying to get in out of nowhere.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnisye0 -
Sitemaps: Best Practice
What should and what shouldn't go in the sitemap? In particular, pages like subscribe to our newsletter/ unsubscribe to our newsletter? Is there really any benefit in highlighting those pages to the SEs? Thanks for any advice/ anecdotes 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Whats the negative effect of incorrect canonical to first page in paginated set?
Hi, I have a new client that has pagination handled incorrectly on their website.... They have it setup as follows: example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=1 example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=2 example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=3
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QubaSEO
etc etc rel=canonical from page 2 to page 1
rel=canonical from page 3 to page 1
etc etc i.e. they aren't using rel=prev, rel=next To get them to invest in the development time need to change this I need to explain to the client how what they have is negatively affecting things? Anyone? Thanks in advance!0 -
Adding Canonical Tags in WYSIWYG Section of Subscription Based Sites
Our company has a paid subscription-based site that only allows us to add HTML in the WYSIWYG section, not in the backend of each individual page. Because we are an e-commerce site, we have many duplicate page issues. Is there a way for us to add or hide the canonical code in the WYSIWYG section instead of us having to make all of our pages significantly different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | expobranders0 -
Can anyone see any issues with the canonical tags on this web site?
The main domain is: http://www.eumom.ie/ And these would be some of the core pages: http://www.eumom.ie/pregnancy/ http://www.eumom.ie/getting-pregnant/ Any help from the Moz community is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IcanAgency0 -
Canonical tag + HREFLANG vs NOINDEX: Redundant?
Hi, We launched our new site back in Sept 2013 and to control indexation and traffic, etc we only allowed the search engines to index single dimension pages such as just category, brand or collection but never both like category + brand, brand + collection or collection + catergory We are now opening indexing to double faceted page like category + brand and the new tag structure would be: For any other facet we're including a "noindex, follow" meta tag. 1. My question is if we're including a "noindex, follow" tag to select pages do we need to include a canonical or hreflang tag afterall? Should we include it either way for when we want to remove the "noindex"? 2. Is the x-default redundant? Thanks for any input. Cheers WMCA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
Canonical tag: how to deal with product variations in the music industry?
Hello here. I own a music publishing company: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/ And we have several similar items which only difference is the instrument they have been written for. For example, look at the two item pages below: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Canon2Vl.html http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Canon2Vla.html They are the exact same piece of music, but written in a different way to target 2 different instrumental combinations. If it wasn't for the user reviews that can make those two similar pages different, Google could see that as duplicate content. Am I correct? And if so, how do you suggest to tackle such a possible problem? Via canonical tags? How? To have a better idea of the magnitude of the problem, have a look at these search results on our site which give you product variations of basically the same piece of music, the only difference is in the targeted instruments: www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Canon+in+D www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Meditation www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Flight And, similarly, we have collections of pieces targeting different instruments: www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Wedding+Collection www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Christmas+Collection www.virtualsheetmusic.com/s.php?k=Halloween+Collection Any thoughts and suggestions to tackle this potential page duplication issue are very welcome! Thank you to anyone in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Best practice to redirects based on visitors' detected language
One of our websites has two languages, English and Italian. The English pages are available at the root level:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Damiano
www.site.com/ English homepage www.site.com/page1
www.site.com/page2 The Italian pages are available under the /it/ level:
www.site.com/it Italian homepage www.site.com/it/pagina1
www.site.com/it/pagina2 When an Italian visitor first visits www.mysit.com we'd like to redirect it to www.site.com/it but we don't know if that would impact search engine spiders (eg GoogleBot) in any way... It would be better to do a Javascript redirect? Or an http 3xx redirect? If so, which of the 3xx redirect should we use? Thank you0