Why is pagination SEO such a mystery in 2021?
-
Hi folks.
I would like to discuss pagination.
I use WordPress (Genesis, specifically).
I ran my site through a site scan and it flagged an error which told me that my blog was producing duplicate meta descriptions because the blog is paginated - the same meta description from the blog page is being used on Page 2, Page 3 etc.
I looked into this and the Internet is awash with many other people scratching around for a solution.
My understanding is that using a canonical link on the first page is not a good idea, because it says to Google that only Page 1 of the blog is important.
I also read an article that states Google no longer reads the Rel=Prev/Next code that could be used to tell Google to ignore the issue.
So, what's the solution?
Do I even need one?
As a side-thought, it seems to me that pagination is, well, pretty useless. I mean, if my blog has 20 pages and I've worked hard to create content, who is going to click through to anywhere near page 20? Nobody. There has to be a smarter way for people on-site to access content.
I would love your thoughts on all of this.
Cheers.
-
Thanks, Paddy!
That was well timed!
I am in the process of developing a blog and am lining up my ducks SEO-wise before I go live. I think I have opened a can of worms.
I have asked the question of StudioPress - why a page allocated to Posts Page is not canonicalised, and neither are paginated pages. Category pages are canonicalised but I'd rather show a dedicated blog page as opposed to a category page for the blog (I only have one category).
I don't want to use a plugin.
I have even been tempted by Ghost but looks like I need a PhD to figure that out!
Thanks again
-
Hi there,
For what it's worth, pagination is a source of contention for many SEOs, so you're not alone here
I think part of the reason for this is that there isn't a perfect answer and I'm yet to see consistent, definitive proof of any one answer being right, particularly when it comes to different types of websites. As you say, for a blog, it may not be that useful anyway. Whereas for an ecommerce website, it's probably more important but even then, users are not likely to click through to hundreds of paginated pages, but search engines may need to crawl them.
Anyway, the timing of your question is funny because earlier I came across this tweet thread from Patrick Stox which does a great job of laying out the options. I'd recommend taking a read:
https://twitter.com/patrickstox/status/1370218363440537601
Ultimately, keep in mind what your goals are - I imagine driving more traffic to key pages on your website. I'd also look at how things are performing at the moment and make decisions based on that. If your paginated pages are getting lots of traffic, you may not want to tinker too much with that. If they aren't, then you can make changes far more easily because you're not risking too much.
I hope that helps a bit!
Paddy
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
-
Menus, Ecommerce & SEO
Hi Our Dev team have updated our website with a new menu structure, they have given us 2 options to choose from. 1st option I think is better for SEO - this will be showing top 8 categories and then subcategories once you hover over category 1. Not much change from our current structure, just a slightly different layout. (I have added an image example of what option1 will look like) 2nd option - is preferred by management - shows all 24 categories & no subcategories. My question is, will removing the current subcategories from the main menu make them lose rankings & make them harder to rank in future? I'm guessing everything will move down a level in the structure and lost page authority... Does anyone have any articles/case studies to prove this point? Any help is much appreciated 🙂 Becky DKzgD
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Pagination & duplicate meta
Hi I have a few pages flagged for duplicate meta e.g.: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches?page=2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey
http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches I can;t see anything wrong with the pagination & other pages have the same code, but aren't flagged for duplicate: http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/coshh-cabinets?page=2 I can't see to find the issue - any ideas? Becky0 -
DeIndexing pagination
I have a custom made blog with boat loads of undesirable URLs in Google's index like this:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman
.com/resources?start=150
.com/resources?start=160
.com/resources?start=170 I've identified this is a source of duplicate title tags and had my programmer put a no index tag to automatically go on all of these undesirable URLs like this: However doing a site: search in google shows the URLs to still be indexed even though I've put the tag up a few weeks ago. How do I get google to remove these URLs from the index? I'm aware that the Search Console has an answer here https://support.google.com/webmasters/topic/4598466?authuser=1&authuser=1&rd=1 but it says that blocking with meta tags should work. Do I just get google to crawl the URL again so it sees the tag and then deindexes the URLs? Or is there another way I'm missing.0 -
SEO Question re: Keyword Cannibalization
I know about Keyword Cannibalization, so I understand why it's generally a problem. If you have multiple versions of the same page, Google has to "guess" which one to display (as I understand it, unless you have a SUPER influential page you won't get both pages showing up on the SERP). To explain why I'm not sure if this applies to our page, we have a blog that we write about employment law issues on. So we might have 20 blog posts over the past year that all talk about recent pregnancy discrimination lawsuits employers might be interested in. Now, searching the Google Keyword tools, there aren't even close to 20 different focus keywords that would make any sense. "Pregnancy Discrimination lawsuit" is niche enough for us to be competitive, but anything more specific than that simply has very little search activity. My suggestion is to just optimize all of them for "pregnancy discrimination lawsuit". My understand of how Panda works is that if the content is different on each page (and it is!) then it will only display what it guesses is the most relevant "NLRB" post, but any link juice sent to the other 19 "NLRB" posts would still boost the relevancy for whatever post Google chooses. And it wouldn't get dinged as keyword stuffing because it's clearly not just the same page repeated over and over. I've found quite a few articles on Keyword Cannibalization but many are pre-Panda. I was CERTAIN I'd seen a post that explained my idea is a totally viable and good one, but of course now I can't find it. So before I go full steam ahead with this strategy I just want to make sure there's nothing I'm missing. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CEDRSolutions0 -
Local SEO for Pregnancy Centers?
So, the thing is, we don't want these websites associated with anything pro-life or Christian. So, we can't list them in those directories. And we can't list them in abortion provider directories because they don't do abortions. The organizaitons are Christian, pro-life -- but the target audience is the complete opposite. How can I effectively market their services without crossing any boundaries?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CGR-Creative0 -
SEO Best practice for competitions
I am considering running a competition and wanted to get some feedback on SEO Best Practice. We will have a unique competition URL - following the completion of the competition it will be 301'd to home page Every entrant will be given a unique URL for the competition to share, if someone enters using there URL they get an extra ticket. This means we will create a large number of new unique URL's over a short period of time, the pages however will have the same content. Is this potentially bad for Duplicate content?Any advice? Perhaps a canonical tag on all unique competition entrant URLs? Any other considerations?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
VBulletin Pagination
I've been looking for quite some time for a way of incorperating rel=next/rel=prev into my vBulletin forum however I've had no joy. I want to try and consolidate my ranking as I have a very large amount of user generated content, but not enough links. Any help would be most appreciated. P.S - I have the vbSEO software and as far as I can see, there's no way of doing it through here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Optimise0 -
In-House SEO - Doubt about one SEO issue - Plz guys help over here =)
Hello, We wanna promote some of our software's. I will give u guys one example bellow: http://www.mediavideoconverter.de/pdf-to-epub-converter.html We also have this domain: http://pdftoepub.de/ How can we deal about the duplicate content, and also how can we improve the first domain product page. If I use the canonical and don't index the second domain and make a link to the first domain it will help anyway? or don't make any difference? keyword: pdf to epub , pdf to epub converter What u guys think about this technique ? Good / Bad ? Is there the second domain giving any value to the first domain page? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | augustos0