ECommerce Problem with canonicol , rel next , rel prev
-
Hi
I was wondering if anyone willing to share your experience on implementing pagination and canonical when it comes to multiple sort options . Lets look at an example
I have a site example.com ( i share the ownership with the rest of the world on that one ) and I sell stuff on the site
I allow users to sort it by date_added, price, a-z, z-a, umph-value, and so on . So now we have
- example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added
- example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=price
- example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=a-z
- example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=z-a
- example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=umph-value
- etc
example.com/for-sale/stuff1 **has the same result as **example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added ( that is the default sort option )
similarly for stuff2, stuff3 and so on. I cant 301 these because these are relevant for users who come in to buy from the site. I can add a view all page and rel canonical to that but let us assume its not technically possible for the site and there are tens of thousands of items in each of the for-sale pages. So I split it up in to pages of x numbers and let us assume we have 50 pages to sort through.
- example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=2 to ...page=50
- example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=price&page=2 to ...page=50
- example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=a-z&page=2 to ...page=50
- example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=z-a&page=2 to ...page=50
- example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=umph-value&page=2 to ...page=50
- etc
This is where the shit hits the fan. So now if I want to avoid duplicate issue and when it comes to page 30 of stuff1 sorted by date do I add
- rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1
- rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=31
- rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=29
or
- rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added
- rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=31
- rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=29
or
- rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1
- rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=31
- rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=29
or
- rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=30
- rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=31
- rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=29
or
- rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=30
- rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=31
- rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=29
None of this feels right to me . I am thinking of using GWT to ask G-bot not to crawl any of the sort parameters ( date_added, price, a-z, z-a, umph-value, and so on ) and use
- rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=30
- rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=31
- rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=29
My doubts about this is that , will the link value that goes in to the pages with parameters be consolidated when I choose to ignore them via URL Parameters in GWT ? what do you guys think ?
-
Thanks Peter .
-
Thanks for your input.
IMHO...If I exclude ? , then paginated pages like ?page=xx wont be crawled , thus the rel=next prev tags on the page are rendered useless.
-
Yeah, it gets ugly fast, and even done "by the book" you're often going to need to monitor your index and make adjustments, I've found. That said, the official Google stance (at least the last I heard) is that you should canonical to the page with no parameters and rel=prev/next to the parameterized versions (your 2nd-to-last example):
- rel canonical = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?page=30
- rel next = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=31
- rel prev = example.com/for-sale/stuff1?sortby=date_added&page=29
See the bottom of this Google blog post:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
The other option would be to use rel=prev/next on the paginated URLs and then dynamically Meta Noindex anything with parameters. Honestly, it really depends on what works, and it can take a while to sort out. Also, keep in mind that Bing doesn't handle rel=prev/next quite the same way as Google.
-
First of all: did you check this video? http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=njn8uXTWiGg
-
You can set the ? as exclude from searches in Webmaster Tool
-
I would always set rel="canonical" to the main page (category page): .
Check how big sites work with this issue.
-
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 to fix rel canonical tags?
Hello there, I am trying to fix the issues with my campaign and I am trying to fix Rel canonical issues. I tried to read a few blogs and other sources which talked about the Rel canonical but I am not able to understand why is Rel Canonical happening? I understand that http://elegancealways.com is not the same as http://elegancealways.com/about-us/ but then I cannot change the link as the link is correct. I read about 301 and 302 redirects. I do not understand that which link is correct then? The errors SEO MOZ is showing is what I am not able to understand as these links are correct. I need help here!! Thanks Vineeta qTc2a2H.png
Technical SEO | | vineeta0 -
Rel=canonical overkill on duplicate content?
Our site has many different health centers - many of which contain duplicate content since there is topic crossover between health centers. I am using rel canonical to deal with this. My question is this: Is there a tipping point for duplicate content where Google might begin to penalize a site even if it has the rel canonical tags in place on cloned content? As an extreme example, a site could have 10 pieces of original content, but could then clone and organize this content in 5 different directories across the site each with a new url. This would ultimately result in the site having more "cloned" content than original content. Is this at all problematic even if the rel canonical is in place on all cloned content? Thanks in advance for any replies. Eric
Technical SEO | | Eric_Lifescript0 -
Identifying a 301-redirect problem?
I was looking at the Search Engine Optimization reports for one of my clients in Google Analytics, and I saw that their two biggest landing pages are www.website.com and http://website.com. Does this mean that Google is serving both the 'www' and 'non-www' versions of the website, and thus harming the website's overall ranking? Thanks for any input!
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0 -
Is it a problem to have a homepage with a slug / URL ?
Hi, We are designing a web site for one of our clients, and using a home made CMS. I don't know how this CMS has been built, but anyways, in the end the homepage has a URL format which looks like this : www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html. No www.mydomain.com. Is it dangerous for SEO to have a slug/URL directly on the homepage ? Do you have experiences, cases where it has impacted a site negatively ? The main problem I expect is duplicate content (with Google seeing both www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html as being different pages) but apparently the CMS is doing a 302 redirect from the root domain to the URL (I told my colleague it should at least be a 301). Sorry if this question seems like basic SEO knowledge, but I really can't find a definitive answer on the subject. Thank you very much 🙂
Technical SEO | | edantadis0 -
SEO problem if homepage is 2 folders deep?
We are currently looking at a site for a client, where instead of featuring standard file structure, every folder is being buried two folders deep by the CMS. So the homepage is: www.domain.com.au/folder/folder And a subpage is: www.domain.com.au/folder/folder/subpage Is this necessarily and SEO problem? Will it be positive for rankings to pull out the two redundant folders? Any insights are appreciated! Cheers
Technical SEO | | MarketingResults0 -
Advice on strange URL problem
I'm considering doing some pro bono work for a local non-profit and upon initial review they have a number of serious issues but there is one in particular I'd like to check my thinking on. The developer who set up the site some years ago implemented a javascript redirect on their root domain so that it redirects to: http://domain.com/wordpress This is wrong for all kinds of reasons and I want to recommend eliminating this redirect and getting rid of the 'wordpress' part of the path altogether. However, the site is quite established with good PR and they would take a hit by changing the path. I'd do 301 redirects to the new URLs that would not have 'wordpress' in the path in addition to other remediation. My question - is my thinking here good? It's worth it, right? The other option is just get rid of the weird redirect and keep 'wordpress' in the path but this seems unacceptable to me. Any opinions?
Technical SEO | | friendlymachine0 -
Rel cannonical on all my URL's
Hi, sorry if this question has already been asked, but I can't seem to find the correct answer. In my crawling report for the domain: http://www.wellbo.de I get rel cannonical notices. I have redirected all pages of http://wellbo.de to http://www.wellbo.de with a 301 redirect. Where is my error? Why do I get these notices? I hope the image helps. Ep7Rw.jpg
Technical SEO | | wellbo0 -
Meta data in includes: not ideal or a problem?
I have pages with meta data being pulled in via an include. This was to prevent people from touching the pages themselves. Is this an optimization issue- or is it OK to do?
Technical SEO | | Tribeca-Marketing-Group0