Filter Pages

[Slumberjac]

Howdy Moz Forum!!

I have a headache of a job over here in the UK and I'd welcome any advice! - It's sunny today, only 1 of 5 days in a year and i'm stuck on this!

I have a client that currently has 22,000 pages indexed to Google with almost 4000 showing as duplicate content.

The site has a "jobs" and "candidates" list. This can cause all sorts of variations such as job title, language, location etc.

The filter pages all seem to be indexed. Plus the static pages are indexed.

For example if there were 100 jobs at Moz being advertised, it is displaying the jobs on the following URL structure -

/moz
/moz/moz-jobs
/moz/moz-jobs/page/2
/moz/moz-jobs/page/3
/moz/moz-jobs/page/4
/moz/moz-jobs/page/5

ETC ETC

Imagine this with some going up to page/250

I have checked GA data and can see that although there are tons of pages indexed this way, non of them past the "/moz/moz-jobs" URL get any sort of organic traffic.

So, my first question! - Should I use rel-canonical tags on all the /page/2 & /page/3 etc results and point them all at the /moz/moz-jobs parent page??

The reason for this is these pages have the same title and content and fall very close to "duplicate" content even though it does pull in different jobs... I hope i'm making sense?

There is also a lot of pages indexed in a way such as-

https://www.examplesite.co.uk/moz-jobs/search/page/9/?candidate_search_type=seo-consulant&candidate_search_language=blank-language

These are filter pages... and as far as I'm concerned shouldn't really be indexed?

Second question! - Should I "no follow" everything after /page in this instance? To keep things tidy? I don't want all the variations indexed! Any help or general thoughts would be much appreciated!

Thanks.

[Keszi]

Glad I could help! Good luck!

[Slumberjac]

Hi guys,

So I went for the Rel-Canonical option and also no indexed the filters and it worked a treat! No loss in rankings at all and site showing organic growth!

Cheers for the response István Keszeg !!

[Keszi]

Hi David,

There was a very good article about this topic back in 2014 (I know it sounds a little bit old, but still it is very descriptive): https://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-to-google-webmaster-recommendations-for-pagination

We also had a similar implementation, and I went with the Option 3B from the article pointed out above: **Option 3: Implement Pagination Relationships + noindex, follow directive after page 2. **

So you want to have only the first page indexed, then set the directive "robots" to "noindex, follow" after the first page. HINT If you use /page/ in your url structure (vs page query parameter), you can also use that to check if that page needs to be indexed or not, as it should only appear after page 2.

I hope it helps.