Confusion about forums and canonical links
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Like many people, I get a lot of alerts about duplicate content, etc. I also don't know if I am hurting my domain authority because of the forum. It is a pretty active forum, so it is important to the site.
So my question is, right now there could be 50 pages like this
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-1
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-2
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-3
all the way to:
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/page-50</domain></domain></domain></domain></domain>So right now the rel canonical links are set up just like above, including the page numbers.
I am not sure if that is the best way or not. I really thought that all the of links for that topic should be
<domain>/forum/index.php/topic/6043-new-modular-parisian-restaurant-10243-is-here/that way it would passing "juice" to the main topic/link. </domain>
I do have other links setup for:
link rel='next',link rel='up',link rel='last'Overall is this correct, or is there a better way to do it?
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You just should no index the archive pages, tags, and others that may have duplicate content. Let's take a blog for example.
You let spiders index and follow all links from your homepage and the that pagination, however, then each post is filed in a category, maybe including tags.
Then you have to decide, and it's really up to you, what to let spiders index (always use follow, there's no reason to use nofollow). I, personally, will allow spiders index the homepage (including pagination), the categories (and their pagination), but I'll put a noindex in the tags and archives (specific pages that show posts within a specific date). Still, allowing all to be followed.
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What do you recommend as far as the indexing. I really don't know, that is why I signed up for this service and learning as I go. Is it better to allow it to index page 1, then noidex,follow the rest. Is it better to not index a forum at all?
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Well, the rel canonical is used to tell the engines "this content is actually on THIS page and THIS is the one you should index". As those canonicals are the result of a pagination, I guess the content displayed in page 3 isn't the same as the content in page 5, and therefore the canonical tags are correctly set.
Then it comes another issue, it is actually important to INDEX those pages? or would it be better to noindex,follow them as what matters is actually the pages they link to... That's something you need to rethink.
Hope that helps!
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