Is this the correct way of using rel canonical, next and prev for paginated content?
-
Hello Moz fellows,
a while ago (3-4 years ago) we setup our e-commerce website category pages to apply what Google suggested to correctly handle pagination.
We added rel "canonicals", rel "next" and "prev" as follows:
On page 1:
On page 2:
On page 3:
And so on, until the last page is reached:
Do you think everything we have been doing is correct?
I have doubts on the way we have handled the canonical tag, so, any help to confirm that is very appreciated!
Thank you in advance to everyone.
-
Fantastic, thank you Paul! Those links are very useful, and I might have already read those when I setup those canonicals (I jut forgot after a few years to have worked on that!)
I'll check them out carefully again
Appreciated your help and prompt reply
All the best,
Fabrizio
-
Yup, that's exactly correct - just the way you first proposed.
And if you want it straight from the horse's mouth, here's Google's own description of implementation best practice for your exact situation:
rel="next" and rel="previous" on the one hand and rel="canonical" on the other constitute independent concepts.Both declarations can be included in the same page.
For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain:
Note the canonical for the page is self referential to the version of the page including the basic variable that defines the actual page, leaving out the more dynamic variable of sessionID - the same way you'd want to leave out the dynamic size or colour variables, for example, which are specific to only that visit.
From https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
With a big whack of followup confirmation in this discussion with Google Engineer Maile Ohye https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/YbXqwoyooGM/0XTh-gIxS7YJDon't forget you can also use the tools in GSC to help GoogleBot understand which of your URL variables are indexable and which should be ignored. Only helps Google itself, but hey, every little bit counts
Good luck!
Paul
-
Thank you Paul, so, what I have been doing so far is correct, right? Here it is again, please, confirm so I can close this thread:
On page 1:
On page 2:
On page 3:
And so on, until the last page is reached:
Is this the correct way to do it then?
-
You want to have each of your paginated category pages include a self-referential canonical tag, Fabrizo, for exactly the reason you mention - to protect the paginated pages from additional variables creating more dupe indexed pages.
Paul
-
Thank you for your reply, but I am sorry Logan, I am confused, you said:
Regarding your recent question about links, a self-referring canonical on those pages will handle that.
So, if I had to follow what you said above, I should add the following canonicals on these pages:
Page 1:
http://www.mysite.com/category/
Page 2:
http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=2
Page 3:
http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=3
But then you said that I don't have to put any canonicals except for the first page... so, I am confused... sorry!
Fact is, all pages may have extra parameters that could cause duplicates, therefore, how can I tackle that without adding a canonical on each page pointing to the "clean" URL without extra parameters? I hope you understand what I mean...
-
No, you do not need a canonical on any page other than page=1. Refer to Andy's set of examples above. What he laid out is exactly how I markup for pagination.
-
Thank you Logan.
So, even if I am on page 4, the canonical must points always to the root? I think I read somewhere that it should point to the page URL without the extra parameters like this:
http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=4
Am I wrong?
-
Yes, you only need the canonical tag on the root (as a self-referring canonical) and on page=1 of your paginated URLs. Regarding your recent question about links, a self-referring canonical on those pages will handle that.
Example:
On this URL- http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=4&orderby=title&view=list
Canonicalize to-Â http://www.mysite.com/category/
Hope that's helpful!
-
I am sorry, but I haven't received an answer to my last inquiry above, I can't close this thread.
-
Another question: what about links on those pages that can take the crawl to possible duplicate because of parameters added to the URL like:
http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=4&orderby=title
http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=4&orderby=title&view=list
etc.? That's probably why we added the canonical I talked about above.... your thoughts?
-
Sorry, it is my understanding I have to leave the canonical just on the first page, is that correct?
Thank you again.
-
Oh, thank you Andy and Logan! So, can I remove the canonical tag altogether?
Thank you so much!
All the best,
Fabrizio
-
I'm with Logan here, Fabrizio. Rel next & prev pagination removes the need to canonical as well. So it would look like this:
Page 1:
Page 2:
Page 3:
It's Google way of understanding that there are similar pages that you wish to lead visitors to.
-Andy
-
Hi,
You don't need the self-referring canonical tags on each of the paginated URLs. Â Other than that it looks good to go.
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 to handle sorting, filtering, and pagination in ecommerce? Canonical is enough?
Hello, after reading various articles and watching several videos I'm still not sure how to handle faceted navigation (sorting/filtering) and pagination on my ecommerce site. Current indexation status: The number of "real" pages (from my sitemap) - 2.000 pages Google Search Console (Valid) - 8.000 pages Google Search Console (Excluded) - 44.000 pages Additional info: Vast majority of those 50k additional pages (44 + 8 - 2) are pages created by sorting, filtering and pagination. Example of how the URL changes while applying filters/sorting: example.com/category -->Â example.com/category/1/default/1/pricefrom/100 Every additional page is canonicalized properly, yet as you can see 6k is still indexed. When I enter site:example.com/category in Google it returns at least several results (in most of the cases the main page is on the 1st position). In Google Analytics I can see than ~1.5% of Google traffic comes to the sorted/filtered pages. The number of pages indexed daily (from GSC stats) - 3.000 And so I have a few questions: Is it ok to have those additional pages indexed or will the "real" pages rank higher if those additional would not be indexed? If it's better not to have them indexed should I add "noindex" to sorting/filtering links or add eg. Disallow: /default/ in robots.txt? Or perhaps add "noindex, nofollow" to the links? Google would have then 50k pages less to crawl but perhaps it'd somehow impact my rankings in a negative way? As sorting/filtering is not based on URL parameters I can't add it in GSC. Is there another way of doing that for this filtering/sorting url structure? Thanks in advance, Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thpchlk0 -
Is rel=prev/next necessary for ecommerce?
We are currently not using rel=prev/next for paginated categories. My predecessor instead canonicaled paginated pages back to the parent. This obviously needs to be fixed. The pages should self-canonical. Is using the parameter handling function of Google Search Console enough, or do we need to have our dev team implement rel=prev/next?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Satans_Apprentice0 -
Putting rel=canonical tags on blogpost pointing to product pages
I came across an article mentioning this as a strategy for getting product pages (which are tough to get links for) some link equity. See #21: content flipping: https://www.matthewbarby.com/customer-acquisition-strategies Has anyone done this? Seems like this isn't what the tag is meant for, and Google may see this as deceptive? Any thoughts? Jim
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Wordpress Comments Pagination
Hi Mozzers What is your view on the following. Should you Paginate comments to increase page speed? If yes, at what # of comments would you begin pagination? (with the objective being decreasing page load times) Apply rel="canonical" back to the main article URL? eg: url/comment-page-1 => url noindex the comment pages? create a "View all" comments page? Thanks in advance for your help! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jeremycabral
J0 -
What is Best Way to Scale RCS Content?
SEO has really moved away from the nitty gritty analysis of backlinking factors, link wheels, and the like and has shifted to a more holistic marketing approach. That approach is best described around MOZ as “Real Company S#it”. RCS is a great way to think about what we really do because it is so much more than just SEO or just Social Media. However, our clients and business owners do want to see results and want it quantified in some way. The way most of our clients understand SEO is by ranking high on specific terms or online avenues they have a better possibility of generating traffic/sales/revenue. They understand this more from the light of traditional marketing, where you pay for a TV ad and then measure to see how much revenue that ad generated. In the light of RCS and the need to target a large number of keywords for a given client, how do most PROs handle this situation; where you have a large number of keywords to target but with RCS? Many I’ve asked tend to use the traditional approach of creating a single content piece that is geared towards a given target keyword. However, that approach can get daunting if you have say 25 keywords that a small business wants to target. In this case is not really a case of scaling down the client expectations? What if the client wants all of the keywords and has the budget? Do you just ramp your RCS content creation efforts? It seems that you can do overkill and quickly run out of RCS content to produce.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AaronHenry0 -
Backlinking from a Canonical Page to the Non-Canonical Doman - Wrong Signals?
Hi Mozzers, Let's say you have www.mysite.com/page, which is a duplicate of www.yoursite.com/page. www.yousite.com/page has a rel canonical link identifying www.mysite.com/page as the original source. www.mysite.com/page has a followed backlink going towards www.yousite.com/home-page. mysite.com has a DA of 44
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
yoursite.com has a DA of 33 Google has chosen to index www.yoursite.com/page instead of www.mysite.com/page. Is the followed backlink responsible for the wrong page being indexed? Thanks!0 -
How do you archive content?
In this video from Google Webmasters about content, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8s6Y4mx9Vw around 0:57 it is advised to "archive any content that is no longer relevant". My question is how do you exactly do that? By adding noindex to those pages, by removing all internal links to that page, by completely removing those from the website? How do you technically archive content? watch?v=y8s6Y4mx9Vw
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SorinaDascalu1 -
Does rel=canonical fix duplicate page titles?
I implemented rel=canonical on our pages which helped a lot, but my latest Moz crawl is still showing lots of duplicate page titles (2,000+). There are other ways to get to this page (depending on what feature you clicked, it will have a different URL) but will have the same page title. Does having rel=canonical in place fix the duplicate page title problem, or do I need to change something else? I was under the impression that the canonical tag would address this by telling the crawler which URL was the URL and the crawler would only use that one for the page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | askotzko0