Advice needed on canonical paginated pages

[Nobody1616542228134]

Hi there.

I use Genesis and StudioPress themes. I recently noticed that the canonical link for blog pages points to the first page on all paginated pages, which I understand is an SEO no-no.

I found some code here that adds a unique canonical link to each paginated page but for categories only. It works fine.

I only have one category for my site.

My question is: is there a downside (or even upside) to not having a blog page and placing a link to my category page in the navigation bar instead, using the category page as the blog page? It looks good and works.

What do you think?

I find it odd that this seems to be an issue across the Internet and the only solution that comes up relies on the Yoast plugin, which I don't want to use (don't want to use a plugin for SEO).

Thanks in advance.

[Nobody1616542228134]

Thanks for the reply!

I really didn't want to use a plugin, but I take your point...maybe it's a need.

I have recently been working with Ghost, which looks like a better option for the blog (the entire project/site is a blog).

I only have one category, so everything is going to be paginated, potentially. Ghost handles this differently - hence my preference there.

Cheers.

[seoelevated]

A few bits of feedback:

• I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Yoast. For Wordpress sites, it's really a pretty good plugin and takes care of a lot of SEO basics.
• Google used to have a specific solution for paginated series, the REL=PREV/NEXT, but that was deprecated about two years ago. Their official advice (albeit through Twitter) was to either treat each page as "standalone" (i.e. self-referencing canonical) or else to include a "view all" type of page with all content accessible without pagination.
• Ideally, when possible, a great solution is to make sure you have enough separate blog "categories" (can be by topic, for example) that each page has all its articles accessible without pagination and then concentrate on getting each blog category page indexed for its appropriate keywords.
• Otherwise, self-referencing canonicals are OK. The main thing is you want each blog article to be discovered, crawled and indexed. So, you don't want to do anything to prevent the discovery of each article. Even if that means that several blog article listing pages end up getting indexed. With this approach, you might even still want to keep (or implement) the rel=prev/next, so that other search engines can use it., and/or for accessibility. Yoast might still be useful for this, as would be some other options like WP-PageNavi