Pagination & SEO

[gracessweetlife]

I have the WP-Pagination plugin and I am wondering how to handle duplicate content issues and what's best for SEO.

My developer initially downloaded the plugin to speed up loading for the home page. Now my home page has 21 pages of paginated content. But the pagination continues with each of my categories as well.

Should I be placing a canonical reference to my home page, or category main page?

My site name is gracessweetlife (dot) com

[Dr-Pete]

Truthfully, implementing these tags properly is way too complex, and I'm not thrilled with Google for how this solution has been structured. Stuart's absolutely right, though - rel=prev/next aren't being used properly on the current site. If you're mid-redesign than probably best to do it right on the new site, as it's not a catastrophe.

[gracessweetlife]

Good Morning Stuart

Thank goodness, I'm not losing my mind, this is exactly what I thought and this is probably the reason why I am receiving rank on these paginated pages and probably the reason for duplicate content. I think I will approach the new designer/developer group about this and have them change it in the new design. I'm either not explaining it properly to my current developer or he's not understanding how it works. To his defence he did mention switching to the Yoast plugin in too. I am a bit fearful to change much of anything right now because I finally returned to search and I haven't completely recovered yet like I mentioned above plus from what I've read whenever you introduce a new design you could experience issues with rank. I'm hoping that won't be an issue but I don't want to muddy the waters either.

Thank you very much Stuart, you've been a great help!

[stukerr]

Hi Grace,

It looks to me like the way your rel=next / prev has been implemented in the wrong way - what it looks like it is telling the search engines is that each of your category pages is actually part of a paginated series of pages, this isn't what it is designed for. What it should be is:

Homepage - http://gracessweetlife.com/

Should have a rel="next" on the link for Page 2 - so:

Page 2

Page 2 - http://gracessweetlife.com/page/2/

Should have a rel="prev" for the link to the previous page (in this case the homepage - so:

Page 1

and a rel="next" for the link to the next page:

Page 3

And so on...

Hope that helps!

Stuart

[gracessweetlife]

Thank you so much for joining in. I am so confused now because this is the reply from my developer:

Hi Grace, below are views of a post and a page. You already have  the prev, next and canonicalhere is a post

| |
|   | <link <span>rel</link <span>='prev' title='Vanilla-Coconut Panna Cotta with Pomegranate Jelly' href=' />

|
|   | <link <span>rel</link <span>='next' title='Chocolate-Hazelnut Spritz Cookies' href=' ' /> |
|   | <meta <span>name</meta <span>="generator" content="WordPress 3.4.1" /> |
|   | <link <span>rel</link <span>='shortlink' href=' ' /> |
|   | |
|   | <meta <span>name</meta <span>="description" content="Martha Stewart's easy, foolproof Holiday Fudge. Chocolate Marshmallow Fudge and White Chocolate Fudge from one easy fudge recipe that takes only 10 minutes to make." /> |
|   | <meta <span>name</meta <span>="keywords" content="easy holiday recipes, easy fudge recipes, easy chocolate fudge recipe, white chocolate fudge, homemade fudge recipe, simple fudge recipe, fudge candy recipes, white chocolate recipes, chocolate fudge recipes, dark chocolate fudge" /> |
|   | <link <span>rel</link <span>="canonical" href=" " />
Here is a page

<link<span>el</link<span>='prev'title='About'ref=' //>

	<link <span>rel</link <span>='next' title='Photography' href=' ' />
	<meta <span>name</meta <span>="generator" content="WordPress 3.4.1" />
	<meta <span>name</meta <span>="description" content="A diverse list of cookbooks that contain simple quick recipes to more complicated gourmet recipes." />
	<meta <span>name</meta <span>="keywords" content="cookbooks, celebrity chef cookbooks, easy recipes, gourmet recipes, cooking techniques, dessert cookbooks, how to cookbooks, ice cream cookbooks, gordon ramsay cookbooks, martha stewart cookbooks" />

<link <span>rel</link <span>="canonical" href="" />

I've removed the links because I'm not sure how links are handled here on the forum and if it's allowed. Can you still get a sense of the coding without the link to the pages?

|

|

[Dr-Pete]

I should also note that our tools don't handle rel=prev/next very well yet, so we're sometimes over-sensitive to duplicates. One you implement those tags, don't worry if it isn't immediately reflected in our crawl - something we're looking at going forward.

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, I'm not a WordPress expert by a long shot, but I'm seeing what Stuart is seeing - no rel=prev/next. I think that probably is one of the safer bets these days. Your site isn't huge, but the paginated archives pages straight from the home page could dilute your index a bit and lessen the ability of your individual posts to rank well. I don't think it's a disaster, but testing out Joost's plugin probably is a good bet.

[stukerr]

Hi Grace,

No worries, the update to the toolbar pagerank might not be exactly tomorrow so keep an eye on the blogs to see when people start to report it.

The Yoast plugin is definitely really good for SEO, but as I mentioned before don't break your blog to get it, although that said a competent wordpress developer should be able to handle it with no problems.

Good luck with SEO, the best thing to do is keep asking more questions! SEOMoz has some great content. If you are new maybe try one of the welcome webinars to see how to get the most out of it : http://www.seomoz.org/dp/welcome-webinars

Best wishes,

Stuart

[gracessweetlife]

Hi Stuart

I didn't realize the toolbar was only updated every few months, I'm assuming from the content in the link the next update should be tomorrow. The first post without rank is dated May 12. Makes more sense now. They are all indexed which is wonderful. I can't get over that the rel next and prev are not on the site because my developer insisted they were, hmm will have to look into this closer. I am going to talk to my new designer/developer team about switching to Yoast. The plugin appears to have a lot more functionality and I think I read in one of the SEOmoz posts that the gentleman that wrote the post switched as well. Looks like it may be the way to go. I wish I understood SEO more. I've joined SEOmoz in hopes that I can learn how to do keyword search, it's the one area that I am completely clueless. I am attaching keywords but I haven't a clue how to do it properly. Thank you so much for you help! I apologize for all the questions. All the best!

[stukerr]

Hi Grace,

Firstly - it does look like you have the rel=canonical on your paginated pages but not the rel = next / prev as far as I can see. Rel=canonical is one way of dealing with paginated pages, however I have personally seen better results using rel = next / prev - so if you can get this set up that would be good, but don't break your site trying to do it. I'm afraid i'm no wordpress expert so I can't advise about moving between SEO plugins.

I would say though that rel = next / prev is more appropriate for paginated pages, as rel = canonical is saying the pages are largely the same content, which with paginated results they are generally not.

As far as having PR / DA / PA on the paginated pages that's not really an issue, a number of sites i've worked on with paginated pages show this and it's totally normal.

All in all I wouldn't worry too much about it - as Google say on that page " Paginated content exists throughout the web and we’ll continue to strive to give searchers the best result, regardless of the page’s rel=”next”/rel=”prev” HTML markup—or lack thereof." - they have to deal with paginated wordpress blogs all the time.

With regard to none of your posts getting an page rank since the change how long ago was this? If you are referring to toolbar pagerank then this is only updated every few months or so - see http://www.seroundtable.com/pagerank-update-may12-15097.html - the more important thing to check is to see if the posts are (a) in the index (which it looks like they are  - http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fgracessweetlife.com&pws=0&hl=en&num=10#q=site:gracessweetlife.com&hl=en&tbo=1&pws=0&prmd=imvns&source=lnt&tbs=qdr:m&sa=X&ei=R8wXUIPLA8a20QWor4GwCw&ved=0CCgQpwUoBA&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=ddc48e83889475dd&biw=1680&bih=833) and (b) are getting any traffic from search engines in your analytics page ?

Hope that helps!

Stuart

[gracessweetlife]

Hi Stuart

Thank you Stuart. I spoke to my developer because I was concerned, I couldn't see where it was but he said it was in place. Stuart I watched this video by Google - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ca/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html. If I'm understanding correctly, rel & prev and canonical should be set up so all the rank goes to the main page, i.e. all the paginated content from my main page should be pointing to my main page, right? I'm noticing in the seomoz reports that each paginated page has rank, it shouldn't right? This will also eliminate the duplicate content, right?

I am presently using All In One SEO and I am terrified to switch because I've been using the Title, Description and Keywords religiously, will my data switch over to Yoast or do I need to add everything back in manually? I've been trying to find a way to pull a report with all my keyword data (to use to generate reports in SEOmoz but I haven't been able to find how to do it in WordPress. Plus if I do make the switch I want to have a backup of the keywords just in case anything goes wonky.

I should say I am in the middle of a site redesign and I am trying to get all the code up and in order before the new site goes live. I've just gone through the worst 3 months, one day all of my posts disappeared from search and it's take me all this time to get back into the search results. I think for the most part we found all the issues. My developer performed a bunch of plugin updates somewhere around the end of April beginning of May which set off a ton of issues. My developer was convinced I had been penalized by Google but I insisted that it couldn't be the issue because to be frank I haven't a clue how to do anything underhanded nor would I. I finally reached out to Google and they stated I hadn't been penalized. I think it had something to do with robots.txt and .htaccess. I'm just happy I reappear in results. (I hired my hosting company and the wonderful gentleman who created the WP htaccess Control plugin, Antonio helped me)The only thing that is still a mystery is why haven't any of my posts since that time earned any page rank, very odd. Hopefully with a little more time I will see some change, crawled pages have increased and Google is crawling quite regularly again. I fell out of search at the most inopportune time because my new cookbook hit the shelves in May. The blogosphere has been very supportive and I've had so many reviewing the book and linking to me but I think all of those links are lost because my issues were during the the time everyone is posting, do you think at some point Google will find those links?

[stukerr]

Hi Grace,

Looking at the source code of your site it doesn't look like the rel=next / prev is on there, you do have a class="next" on one of your paginated links, but this isn't the same. There's more information on rel=next / prev and ways to deal with pagination on this google blog post:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

Like I said Yoast's wordpress plugin is very good for dealing with all these issues, so if you have a developer who setup the site, i'd speak to them about getting this installed.

Hope that helps!

Stuart

[gracessweetlife]

Hi Stuart

I believe my pages do have the rel=next and rel=prev but I think from the seomoz reports it appears the paginated content is ranked and I wondering if it's better for the main page to receive all the rank, am I making sense. This is all new to me and I'm trying to understand the best process for paginated content and also how to handle the duplicate content the pagination creates.

[stukerr]

Hey Grace,

For paginated content there are also the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags to let the search engines know that the paginated pages are just that, paginated. Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin takes care of this as well as being generally awesome : http://yoast.com/rel-next-prev-paginated-archives/

Hope that helps!

Stuart