Which Pagination/Canonicalization Page Selection Approach Should be Used?
-
Currently working on a retail site that has a product category page with a series of pages related to each other i.e. page 1, page 2, page 3 and Show All page. These are being identified as duplicate content/title pages. I want to resolve this through the applications of pagination to the pages so that crawlers know that these pages belong to the same series. In addition to this I also want to apply canonicalization to point to one page as the one true result that rules them all. All pages have equal weight but I am leaning towards pointing at the ‘Show All’. Catch is that products consistently change meaning that I am sometimes dealing with 4 pages including Show All, and other times I am only dealing with one page (...so actually I should point to page 1 to play it safe). Silly question, but is there a hard and fast rule to setting up this lead page rule?
-
Hello Oxfordcomma,
If you have fast page load times on the view all pages you can make those canonical. This is Google's recommendation: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html .
If those pages can be large and cause latency issues (slow loading) the better option would be rel next/prev and none of them would be "canonical" for the others, as they would each stand on their own. You may consider at that point adding a robots noindex,follow tag to the View All page, but Google generally does a very good job of figuring this out on their own and I prefer to let them do it.
In summary: If you have good View All pages with fast load times use those as canonical, regardless of how many products you have (e.g. 5 or 25) as long as no latency issues are apparent. Use this tool to test it: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights . If the View All pages are too big for most of your categories to load fast go with Rel Next Prev.
Rel Next Prev info:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
View All Canonical info:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html
It can get a little more complicated if you are dealing with pagination AND faceted search or multiple URL parameters acting as filters.
-
Firstly, thanks for the response. I think I was not clear enough in my explanation. I am currently dealing with a category page for towels - showing the full mix of towels (make and brand) that the site has to offer, 50+ products e.g.
/towels (aka /towels-p1)
/towels-p2
/towels-p3
/towels-show-all (show all allows you to view all results from above pages)Meta details attached to the above are from the one source hence duplication issues.
This is why I thought poagination/canonicalization would be applicable. Thanks for reviewing my question.
-
You should rel=canonical only in cases you have duplicate content, which may be case when
1. You want to have both pages available
2. You have similar content due to some choices at your page- you have pages for 10 items and 20 items per page while this list has only 5 items in it so both pages showing same content.
3. You need to control the level of parameters you want search engines to take care of. For e.g. you have 3 parameters state, city, street but as taking all three together will give you a lot of data so you may be just going upto city even when street was there in URL.
Also you should use re=prev and rel=next for URLs with pagination.
You can read more about it at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
-
Hey there,
If each page has unique content, you don't want to use canonicalization as you wont get the "SEO Juice" from each individual page.
What I would do is modify the page title for each page.
For example, "Green Widgets - Page 2 | Cheapwidgets.com"Does that make sense?
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
-
Does "google selected canonical" pass link juice the same as "user selected canonical"?
We are in a bit of a tricky situation since a key top-level page with lots of external links has been selected as a duplicate by Google. We do not have any canonical tag in place. Now this is fine if Google passes the link juice towards the page they have selected as canonical (an identical top-level page)- does anyone know the answer to this question? Due to various reasons, we can't put a canonical tag ourselves at this moment in time. So my question is, does a Google selected canonical work the same way and pass link juice as a user selected canonical? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Lewald10 -
I have duplicate content but // are causing them
I have 3 pages duplicated just by a / Example: https://intercallsystems.com/intercall-nurse-call-systems**//**
Technical SEO | | Renalynd
https://intercallsystems.com/intercall-nurse-call-systems**/** What would cause this?? And how would I fix it? Thanks! Rena0 -
Half of my site is private for members only, should I use the Nofollow on these pages?
I'm trying to increase more traffic to my website. However half of my website is for members only and you have to be logged in to see content on those pages. I'm confused on whether I should use "nofollow" on these pages or not.
Technical SEO | | DelcoUSA0 -
Page for page 301 redirects from old server to new server
Hi guys:
Technical SEO | | cindyt-17038
I have a client who is moving their entire ecommerce site from one hosting platform (Yahoo Store) to another (BigCommerce) and from one domain to another. The old domain is registered with the Yahoo as of yesterday and we have redirected the old domain (at the domain level) to the new domain. However, we are having trouble getting the pages to redirect page for page. Currently they are all redirecting to the new domain home page. We did just move the old domain from GoDaddy to Yahoo yesterday thinking this would solve it however as of this morning the old pages are still redirecting to the home page of the new domain. To complete the 301 redirect picture, we uploaded the redirects (all relative links for both from and to) to BigCommerce. And while the domain was hosted at GoDaddy with a redirect to the new domain, they were working. We moved the domain to Yahoo because of email issues thinking it should still work. Is it possibly just a waiting game now as the change populates across the DNS? old url to test:
rock-n-roll-action-figures.com/fender-jazz-bass-miniature-guitar-replica-classic-red-finish.html0 -
Why is an error page showing when searching our website using Google "site:" search function?
When I search our company website using the Google site search function "site:jwsuretybonds.com", a 400 Bad Request page is at the top of the listed pages. I had someone else at our company do the same site search and the 400 Bad Request did not appear. Is there a reason this is happening, and are there any ramifications to it?
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
SEO-MOZ bar question on root vs subdomain / canonicalization issues
When I look at the SEO-MOZ bar for our site and click next to subdomain (# links from #domains) it shows my main incoming links etc. but when I click on root domain ity shows mydomain/default.asp and 4 incoming links as well as a message that says this url redirects to another url. Does this imply canonicalization issues or is there a 301 redirect to my non /default.asp correcting this issue. Thanks kindly, Howard
Technical SEO | | mrkingsley0 -
Redesign existing websites / worried about urls / mapping
Hi Guys, While redesigning existing websites that will have page name changes such as: example.com/products to be called example.com/solutions example.com/about-us to be called example.com/about should I 301 the old url to the new url. In the past I have not done this & I'm just wondering from an SEO point of view how bad is this? (On a scale of 1 to 10 how bad is this not 301ing urls, 10 being really bad & 1 being fine), Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Socialdude0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Title for product pages. Is there a way to fix it?
We we're doing pretty good with our SEO, until we added product listing pages. The errors are mostly Duplicate Page Content/Title. e.g. Title: Masterpet | New Zealand Products MasterPet Product page1 MasterPet Product page2 Because the list of products are displayed on several pages, the crawler detects that these two URLs have the same title. From 0 Errors two weeks ago, to 14k+ errors. Is this something we could fix or bother fixing? Will our SERP ranking suffer because of this? Hoping someone could shed some light on this issue. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Peter.Huxley590