Pagination & SEO
-
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
-
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.
-
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!
-
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 - http://gracessweetlife.com/page/2/
Should have a rel="prev" for the link to the previous page (in this case the homepage - so:
and a rel="next" for the link to the next page:
And so on...
Hope that helps!
Stuart
-
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?
|
|
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
-
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!
-
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
-
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?
-
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
-
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.
-
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
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
-
How do you report SEO audit findings?
Hello, Mozzers! I'm curious to know how you report SEO audit findings. Do you use a spreadsheet? A presentation? A formal report? Or maybe something else. If you have a favourite audit template, I'd love to see it. A second question: what things do you report in an audit? I currently report crawl findings, authority and trust, link profiles, and competitive analysis. I also investigate a site's security—that's not usually part of an audit, but site owners need to know about it. What do you report to your audit customers? Thanks for sharing your auditing wisdom!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
Seo for my medium.com site
I have my regular site blog at www.Guideyourhealth.org and a blog on www.medium.com, should I try to get back links for my medium articles as well that are on topics not competing with my site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BuyKratomPowderInfo0 -
Why is hosting good for SEO?
I've heard a few people mention this now. I have seen hosting packages range from £5 to £1000 per month, and I understand that each comes with their own amounts of storage space, bandwidth and all. Now I understand that page speed is important to SEO and the type of hosting will dictate your page speed, but other than this why is hosting important to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Menu Structure & SEO
Hi I have been trying to decide whether we need to change our menu structure http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/ We have a lot of subcategories which are not in the menu structure and for SEO I wonder whether its best to have menu drop downs, so if a customer hovers over one category, it will display all the subcategories within this. I am concerned that sub categories we are trying to rank are many levels away from the homepage e.g If you want to find leather office chairs from the homepage, you have to go to the 'More categories' link, then choose seating > office seating > leather office seating. Users need to do a lot of navigating before seeing what we offer. I would prefer if a user could see these options in the menu when they hover over it. Does anyone think this would help SEO or just customer journey? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Yoast or Premium SEO Pack?
Which one is better Yoast or premium SEO pack excluding that one is paid & other is free. Because when we are doing SEO $39 doesn't make a huge difference as compared to the work we do right? Which one will you suggest out of the two?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Is this link SEO-Friendly?
Hi Mozzers, Was wondering if someone could tell me if this link is SEO-friendly? class = "sl">name="sc" type="checkbox" value="1449"><a <span="">href</a> <a <span="">="</a>http://www.example.com/" onclick = "Javascript: return dosc(2);">src="imsd/coff.gif" id="cbsc2"/>Keyword It has some Javascript that makes the link work like a filter. Cheers, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
How do I make my URLs SEO friendly?
Hi all, I am aware that overly-dynamic URLs hurt a website's SEO potential and I want to fix mine. At present they look like this: http://www.societyboardshop.co.uk/products.php?brand=Girl+Skateboards&BrandID=153 What do I need to do to fix them please... do I add some code to the htaccess file? Many thanks, much apreciated. Paul.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul530 -
Are dropdown menus bad for SEO
I have an ecommerce shop here: http://m00.biz/UHuGGC I've added a submenu for each major category and subcategory of items for sale. There are over 60 categories on that submenu. I've heard that loading this (and the number of links) before the content is very bad for SEO. Some will place the menu below the content and use absolute positioning to put the menu where it currently is now. It's a bit ridiculous in doing things backwards and wondering if search engines really don't understand. So the question is twofold: (1) Are the links better in a bottom loading sidemenu where they are now? (2) Given the number of links (about 80 in total with all categories and subcategories), is it bad to have the sidemenu show the subcategories which, in this instance, are somewhat important? Should I just go for the drilldown, e.g. show only categories and then show subcategories after? Truth is that users probably would prefer the dropdown with all the categories and second level subcategories, despite the link number and placement.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | attorney1