Canonical pagination content

[CNMOnline28]

Hello

We have a large ecommerce site, as you are aware that ecommerce sites has canonical issues, I have read various sources on how best to practice canonical on ecommerce site but I am not sure yet..

My concert is pagination where I am on category product listing page.. the pagination will have all different product not same however the meta data will be same so should I make let's say page 2 or 3 to main category page or keep them as is to index those pages?

Another issue is using filters, where I am on any page and I filter by price or manufacturer basically the page will be same so here It seems issue of duplicate content, so should I canonical to category page only for those result types?

So basically If I let google crawl my pagination content and I only canonical those coming with filter search result that would be best practice? and would google webmaster parameter handling case would be helpful in this scenario ?

Please feel free to ask in case you have any queries

regards
Carl

[john4math]

Google just announced some tags to help support pagination better.  They say if you have a view all option that doesn't take too long to load, searchers generally prefer that, so you can rel=canonical to that page from your series pages.  However, if you don't have a view all page, then you can put these nifty rel="next" and rel="prev" tags in to let Google know your page has pagination, and where the next and previous pages are.

View all: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

next/prev: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

[Sved]

I checked your site, and don't know whether you already changed it or not, but it looks pretty good. I have dealt with much more hardcore issues, meaning where you have tons of products in each category, several filters which can be freely permutated, and in the meantime you were able to paginate as well. There were a lot of canonical issues, so your case is an easy ride, believe me.

Here are a few tips, and I reason why I suggest them:

1) cutting back your navigation on deeper pages

I just quickly checked how many links is included in your site-wide navigation with Google Spreadsheet:

=ImportXML("http://www.cnmonline.co.uk/Dehumidifiers-c-778.html","//h6/a/@href")

And it got back 142 links. Whoa, thats a lot. And that many links are included in all of your pages, and the navigation is placed BEFORE your content. I had this very same issue with a client, they were hesitating to change the navigation, but eventually it helped them, a lot.

The suggested solution:

• wipe out the drop menu links from deeper pages
• only link to the big categories: "Air Treatment", "Bathroom", ... "Cleaning Products"
• in the category you are in, you can link to subcategories (without any javascript/css drop menu, just simply list them beneath the main category with a different background than darkblue), for example if you are in the Bathroom category, your left navigation will look like:
  • Air Treatment
  • Bathroom
    • Electric Showers
    • Mirror Demister
    • Bathroom Heaters
    • Heated Towel Rails
  • Catering Equipment
  • ...
  • Cleaning Products

So this way you don't have to change a lot in your navigation, and it will make your interlinking more consistent. Furthermore if a user wants to find an another category, there is the search box, the main categories, and the breadcrumb. Which leads to the next suggestion:

2) Make the breadcrumb look like a breadcrumb, not like a tab.

This is just a personal feeling, but now it looks like a tab rather than a breadcrumb. These add up resulting in my feeling: "item1 | item 2 | item3" without underlining the links (so they not looking and feeling like links), and not beginning at the left side of the site, instead next to the left navigation.

Suggested solution:

• move your breadcrumb to the very left side of your site, above your navigation box, you can position it to start from the left side as your navigation box starts (it looks like 15px padding from the left side of the white background)
• the text can be smaller, but make the links underlined, to look like links
• change the pipeline ("|") character with a greater than character (">"), that's much more like a breadcrumb

3) make your pagination link follow, and the pagination pages meta "follow,noindex"

Now at the moment you have nofollowed your pagination links, which results in lower indexation between your product pages than it would possible.

Eg:

• this is cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.cnmonline.co.uk/Bathroom-Products-c-2278.html&hl=en&strip=1
• but the 2nd page isn't: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.cnmonline.co.uk%2FBathroom-Products-c-2278-p-2.html
• and whats even worse, but not surprising, this item on the second page isn't indexed: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.cnmonline.co.uk%2FSavoy-Shawl-Collar-Bath-Robe-Box-of-5-pr-36295.html

Suggested solution:

• let the google bot follow your pagination links, remove the rel nofollow attribute from the links
• make the pagination pages meta robots "follow,noindex"

This change means the google bot can follow your product pages, but won't index those paginated pages. This is awesome, since you don't want to hassle with unique title, description, and the pagination pages are just lists, they don't give any additional value or any reason to be indexed.

Of course if you had pagination issue with reviews, then it would be a whole different story, because then each paginated pages would be valuable, since they are listing valuable user generated content, and not just essentially linking to product pages. So in that case, you might create unique titles and description at least by adding "page X".

4) Your filters aren't causing duplication / canonical issue, since they work on an ajax basis, and they don't create any new url.

So here you shouldn't change anything, but I guess this don't surprise you. You can always check this, by using 'cache:' in google and selecting text-only version, for example: "cache:http://www.cnmonline.co.uk/Bathroom-Heaters-c-2320.html", click text-only version, and you will see that Price Range and Manufacturer have no links which google could follow, so no canonical problem.

Hope this helps.

[CNMOnline28]

Is it best method to get canonical url redirect with paging to view all pages including all the urls coming with price and sorting filters? any other members would like to share their opinions?

regards

Carl

[Dan-Petrovic]

View all! Of course... how did I not think of that before? Thank you.

[wissamdandan]

Concerning Pagination,

I would create a "view all" where all the products are listed under this category. then i add rel canonical linking to the "View All " page.

its can help you with your first question and for the issue using filters.