Is a canonical tag the best solution for multiple search listing pages in a site?
-
I have a site where dozens of page listings are showing in my report with a parameter showing the page number for the listings. Is the best solution to canonical these page listings back a core page (all-products)? Or, do I change my site configuration in Webmasters to ignore "page" parameters? What's the solution?
Example URL 1- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=84
Example URL 2- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=85
Example URL 3- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=86
Thanks in advance for your direction.
-
Correct, it is a pita to do, but if you do things correctly and have an array that you can draw meta information from, it will get indexed. That is what we all want, instead of making a category of "red ipods" you can just have the search for "red pods" indexed, while disallowing anything from ?search=other term
-
When you say "have that rewritten", you mean just rewrite the URL to remove the "?search=" ...right? Awesome. Thanks for the answer.
-
Like the taco commercial says "Why not do both" seriously, that is what I would do. What cart / cms are you using? I have a trick I have done on a few sites that does a 1up to google on that one. Here is what I do (if it is possible in your cart /cms)
On an e-commerce site, there are some fairly common searches. The cart that i develop in actually saves the searches and how many times people have searched them. What I do is find the top 10 or so and use the htaccess to rewrite the url of the search. So instead of it being like http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?search=ipod have that rewritten to http://mydomain.com/products/all-products/ipod you can do the same for categories as well, which I think is what you are working with. The only thing you have to keep in mind, is most cms / carts will use the same title and meta description for the pages. So you can either write an override or a module that prints out what you want for the meta information on the search pages. Its pretty crafty, but it works well once you get it down.
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
-
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical.
Over 40+ pages have been removed from the indexed and this page has been selected as the google preferred canonical. https://studyplaces.com/about-us/ The pages affected by this include: https://studyplaces.com/50-best-college-party-songs-of-all-time-and-why-we-love-them/ https://studyplaces.com/15-best-minors-for-business-majors/ As you can see the content on these pages is totally unrelated to the content on the about-us page. Any ideas why this is happening and how to resolve.
Technical SEO | | pnoddy0 -
Company blog. What are the best solutions?
Hello Moz Community! Our company has its own blog (www.awarablogs.com) - the blog was created some time ago by means of a simple blog-engine. Now we see that the structure of the blog is bad for SEO (it has long URLs, many useless folders, subdomains and so on), so we'd like to simplify it. But the engine doesn't allow to change its structure in the way we 'd like to. Our webmaster suggested that we use "Alias". Will this method really help us make our blog SEO-friendly? Or is it better to choose another blog software like Wordpress? Thank you very much!
Technical SEO | | Awaraman0 -
Adding Rel Canonical to multiple pages
Hi, Our CMS generates a lot of duplicate content, (Different versions of every page for 3 different font sizes). There are many other reasons why we should drop this current CMS and go with something else, and we are in the process of doing that. But for now, does anyone know how would I do the following: I've created a spreadsheet that contains the following: Column 1: rel="canonical" tag for URL Column 2: Duplicate Content URL # 1 Column 3: Duplicate Content URL # 2 Column 4: Duplicate Content URL # 3 I want to add the tag from column 1 into the head of every page from column 2,3, and 4. What would be a fast way to do this considering that I have around 1800 rows. Check the screenshot of the builtwith.com result to see more information about the website if that helps. Farris bxySL
Technical SEO | | jdossetti0 -
ECommerce site - Duplicate pages problem.
We have an eCommerce site with multiple products being displayed on a number of pages. We use rel="next" and rel="prev" and have a display ALL which I understand Google should automatically be able to find. Should we also being using a Canonical tag as well to tell google to give authority to the first page or the All Pages. Or was the use of the next and prev rel tags that we currently do adequate. We currently display 20 products per page, we were thinking of increasing this to make fewer pages but they would be better as this which would make some later product pages redundant . If we add 301 redirects on the redundant pages, does anyone know of the sort of impact this might cause to traffic and seo ?. General thoughts if anyone has similar problems welcome
Technical SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Hreflang on non-canonical pages
Hi! I've been trying to figure out what is the best way to solve this dilemma with duplicate content and multiple languages across domains. 1 product info page 2 same product but GREEN
Technical SEO | | LarsEriksson
3 same product but RED
4 same product but YELLOW **Question: ** Since pages 2,3,4 just varies slightly I use the canonical tag to indicate they are duplicates of page 1. Now I also want to indicate there are other language versions with the_ rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _element. Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on the canonical page only pointing to the canonical page with "x" language. Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages pointing to the canonical page with the "x" language? Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages and then point it to the translated page (even if it is not a canonical page) ? /Lars0 -
Paging Links Code - Best Way?
Currently we are using previous 1 2 3 next for our link to other inventory pages, with some variation of this javascript code javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$phMain$dlPagesTop$ctl01$lnkPageTop','') . Can search engines even index the other pages with this javascript? Is there a better way to do this?
Technical SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Bing rank drop off for multiple sites
Hi Mozzers, Seeing some wacky stuff going on on some sites I manage. In more than a few, the ranking on bing has dropped basically overnight from page one spots to not being found on the first 100 positions. Anyone else seeing similar results? Some of the sites are fairly new, some have been around for ages, some are wordpress, some are not. I've been searching for some news of a big change on bing, but keep reading about bing dropping the thin sites during black friday. In one example, I had the site set up in BWT for a while, and had a look at the data. The reports show that the pages are crawled, the index summary shows pages indexed, and there seems to be no crawl errors, but rankings are absolutely gone. Also, I can't see the sites in bing if I search "site:example.com" in bing. Here's 2 examples, the first would make sense since it's pretty thin as I havent added much content yet: http://homewindowtint.org but this one doesn't make sense to me. Sure there's a few errors, but to be dropped like a rock seems weird http://www.ahmedandsukaram.com
Technical SEO | | rosstaylor0 -
Rel canonical or 301 the Index Page?
Still a bit confused on best practice for /index.php showing up as duplicate for www.mysite.com. What do I need to do and How?
Technical SEO | | bozzie3110