Paging. is it better to use noindex, follow
-
Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category
or just let Google index these pages
Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link
So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-)) My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site.
Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page
Thanks!
-
Hi Theo, This is an old post you commented on, but I wanted to expand on the question and ask your thoughts: I have a real estate website where I show MLS listings (properties for sale shared by Realtors) which means these MLS listings also exit on 100+ other real estate sites. For my various MLS result pages I use rel=prev / next for paginated pages. Now, here is the question: should I also ad a "no index, follow" on these paginated pages? According to a Google blog post it said no need to use when using rel=prev / next. However, in my case these pages are very similar to other pages around the web and not original content. Yes, I know I could make more unique by adding content, but that is not what my users want. I need a simple clean look with minimal words. So, if I have a result page with 10 pages, would no index follow 9 of those pages make sense to reduce the duplicate content on my website? Or, is issue that my result page will look "thin" compared to competitors and that will impact my ranking negatively?
-
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. 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
-
I was talking about the same concept you're describing when I mentioned category listings. The next / previous and related items sound exactly like the things that I would recommend to get links to the page > 1 items! Lastly, yes the canonical URL should be the page we're actually viewing and not always page 1.
-
What do you mean by category listings? I'm talking about category pages where each item in the category is listed.
I do link from product or item pages to each other using next, previous and related items.
Also I'm pretty sure about this but just asking, rel=canonical for page 2,3 should be that page and not page 1 ?
-
You're welcome! It is a link from one page of your website to another, thus an internal link. I don't see how noindex,follow would change that. Yes, they will receive link juice. Because of the follow in the robots tag the pages (even though they aren't indexed) still pass link juice. Like I said in my original post, it is best to have other pages (such as category listings for example) link to these items as welll though.
-
Thanks for the answer.
Does a link from a page with noindex,follow count as an internal link? Will the items on page 2 receive any link juice, if their only internal link is from a noindexed page?
What do you think?
-
From what I've read on the internet, it is best to "noindex,follow" all pages >1. This issue had bugged me for quite some time as well, and I've struggled to find good resources explaining why their solution was the best. Now that I've actually given the subject some thought, and finally managed to read some quality material on the matter, it all makes sense.
It's basically a checklist. Do you want search engines to
-
index your paginated result pages: yes / no
-
reach the items that are listed in your paginated result pages: yes / no
In most cases you don't want your paginated result pages to be indexed. With our without Panda, visitors get little value from actually viewing 'page 7' in your result pages. That actual page provides little or no value to those visitors. However, you DO want those items listed on these paginated pages to be crawled, especially when you don't have any other pages linking to them (which you should by the way). This boils down to:
-
Don't nofollow your paginated links (because you want search engine spiders to reach them)
-
Put "noindex,follow" in the meta robots tag for all pages >1 (thus page 2 and greater) so the engines will no index these paginated results, but will crawl on to the pages that are behind the listings
Good luck!
-
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
How would you link build to this page?
Hi Guys, I'm looking to build links to a commercial page similar to this: https://apolloblinds.com.au/venetian-blinds/ How would you even create quality links (not against Google TOS) to a commercial page like that? Any ideas would be very much appreciated. Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts140 -
Anyone used Fatjoe?
Interested to know if anyone has used or using Fatjoe content/blogger outreach. Seems fairly expensive, but reasonable quality. Reviews or comments welcome. Thanks Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Using cononical and rel=next / prev for single page app
Hi, We are currently working on a single page ember.js website which compares LED light bulbs (seriously...) the site is www.whichledlight.com the problem in question is www.whichledlight.com/bulbs we are using both rel=next/prev as well as cononical and wondering what affect this would have? all the canonical reference themselves I think, and are also present on the product pages. Our google impressions have dropped recently as well, so we are wondering wether or not this is having a negative affect in regards to how well google wants to play with us. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup0 -
We are switching our CMS local pages from a subdomain approach to a subfolder approach. What's the best way to handle this? Should we redirect every local subdomain page to its new subfolder page?
We are looking to create a new subfolder approach within our website versus our current subdomain approach. How should we go about handling this politely as to not lose everything we've worked on up to this point using the subdomain approach? Do we need to redirect every subdomain URL to the new subfolder page? Our current local pages subdomain set up: stores.websitename.com How we plan on adding our new local subfolder set-up: websitename.com/stores/state/city/storelocation Any and all help is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO.CIC0 -
What can you do when Google can't decide which of two pages is the better search result
On one of our primary keywords Google is swapping out (about every other week) returning our home page, which is more transactional, with a deeper more information based page. So if you look at the Analysis in Moz you get an almost double helix like graph of those pages repeatedly swapping places. So there seems to be a bit of cannibalizing happening that I don't know how to correct. I think part of the problem is the deeper page would ideally be "longer" tail searches that contain the one word keyword that is having this bouncing problem as a part of the longer phrase. What can be done to try prevent this from happening? Can internal links help? I tried adding a link on that term to the deeper page to our homepage, and in a knee jerk reaction was asked to pull that link before I think there was really any evidence to suggest that that one new link made a positive or negative effect. There are some crazy theories floating around at the moment, but I am curious what others think both about if adding a link from a informational to a transactional page could in fact have a negative effect, and what else could be done/tried to help clarify the difference between the two pages for the search engines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plumvoice0 -
Wordpress Tag Pages - NoIndex?
Hi there. I am using Yoast Wordpress Plugin. I just wonder if any test have been done around the effects of Index vs Noindex for Tag Pages? ( like when tagging a word relevant to an article ) Thanks 🙂 Martin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Can a home page penalty cause a drop in rankings for all pages?
All my main keywords have dropped out of the SERPS. Could it be that the home page (the strongest) page has been devalued and therefore 'link juice' that used to spread throughout the site is no longer doing so. Would this cause all other pages to drop? I just can't understand how all my pages have lost rankings. The site is still indexed so there's no problem there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0