Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
The Mysterious Case of Pagination, Canonical Tags
-
Hey guys,
My head explodes when I think of this problem. So I will leave it to you guys to find a solution...
My root domain (xxx.com) runs on WordPress platform.
I use Yoast SEO plugin.
The next page of root domain -- page/2/ -- has been canonicalized to the same page -- page/2/ points to page/2/ for example.
The page/2/ and remaining pages also have this rel tags:
I have also added "noindex,follow" to page/2/ and further -- Yoast does this automatically.
Note: Yoast plugin also adds canonical to page/2/...page/3/ automatically.
Same is the case with category pages and tag pages. Oh, and the author pages too -- they all have self-canonicalization, rel prev & rel next tags, and have been "noindex, followed."
Problem:
Am I doing this the way it should be done?
I asked a Google Webmaster employee on rel next and prev tags, and this is what she said: "We do not recommend noindexing later pages, nor rel="canonical"izing everything to the first page." (My bad, last year I was canonicalizing pages to first page).
One of the popular blog, a competitor, uses none of these tags. Yet they rank higher. Others following this format have been hit with every kind of Google algorithm I could think of. I want to leave it to Google to decide what's better, but then again, Yoast SEO plugin rules my blog -- okay, let's say I am a bad coder.
Any help, suggestions, and thoughts are highly appreciated.
Update 1: Paginated pages -- including category pages and tag pages -- have unique snippets; no full-length posts. Thought I'd make that clear.
-
Hey There
Assuming your WordPress theme isn't conflicting with any of this, so long as you select "noindex subpages of archives" in Yoast you should be good to go. No need playing around with anything else.
-Dan
-
--> I think it's important to look at your site as a whole and divide the number of all pages by paginated pages.
I barely have control over these paginated pages. WordPress automatically takes care of this. I do, however, have the power to add a fixed number of links per paginated page. For example, I can set "10" in WordPress panel and every paginated page -- homepage, page/2/ for example -- will have 10 links (10 articles).
Subsequent pages will be automatically created as I feed my blog with more content.
Thanks Irving!
-
The noindex,follow tag on paginated pages will not compromise your sites integrity with Google. I think it's important to look at your site as a whole and divide the number of all pages by paginated pages. If the ratio is above 10%, I would be concerned that the site may appear to be more of a directory and it definitely would make sense to noindex the site. Also, there are paginated pages with just a bunch of links and other paginated pages with a lot more data surrounding the links. The fact that others are ranking higher probably have more to do with overall site content and PR.
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
-
Duplicate Content Issues with Pagination
Hi Moz Community, We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue. https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2 https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4 Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
Can I set a canonical tag to an anchor link?
I have a client who is moving to a one page website design. So, content from the inner pages is being condensed in to sections on the 'home' page. There will be a navigation that anchor links to each relevant section. I am wondering if I should leave the old pages and use rel=canonical to point them to their relevant sections on the new 'home' page rather than 301 them. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Vizergy0 -
Do canonical tags pass all of the link juice onto the URL they point to?
I have an ecommerce website where the category pages have various sorting and paging options which add a suffix to the URLs. My site is setup so the root category URL, domain.com/category-name, has a canonical tag pointing to domain.com/category-name/page1/price however all links, both interner & external, point to the former (i.e. domain.com/category-name). I would like to know whether all of the link juice is being passed onto the canonical tag URL? Otherwise should I change the canonical tag to point the other way? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tjhossy0 -
H1 Tag as Logo on the Homepage.
So I was working on a Genesis theme website where they have the H1 Tag as the Logo on the homepage. I wanted this changed because I always use my H1 tag to include a keyword I want to rank for. I was told by the Genesis Forum Manager that Yoast said the Logo should be the H1 tag on the homepage. (Yoast has a WP SEO Plugin that is very popular) That makes no sense to me, so I was looking for Opinions. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | netviper0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1 -
Header Tags
Ok so I am writing different pages and the first heading is an H3 just because I wanted to it be a certain size. Then as you see the content, I have an H1 tag. Example page: http://www.oxfordmshomes.net/condos/acadia-court-Oxford-MS you can see that "Acadia First" is the first thing you see on the page and it uses an H3 element. Long story short, my hierarchy is wrong. Does this have any negative effect on my SEO efforts?
Technical SEO | | blake-766240 -
Alt and Title Attributes in Anchor Tags
Does it hurt to use alt and title attributes inside an anchor tag? Example: view my website article
Technical SEO | | donationtown0 -
Should there be a canonical tag on my 404 error page?
In my crawl diagnostics, I notice some 4xx client errors. They are appearing for pages that no longer exist, so I'm not sure what the problem is. Shouldn't they just be dealt as 404's? Anyway, on closer inspection I noticed that my 404 error page contains a canonical tag which points to the missing page. Could this be the issue? Is it a good idea to remove the canonical tag from this error page? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Leighm0