Why is "Noindex" better than a "Canonical" for Pagination?
-
"Noindex" is a suggested pagination technique here: http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284, and everyone seems to agree that you shouldn't canonicalize all pages in a series to the first page, but I'd love if someone can explain why "noindex" is better than a canonical?
-
I guess the short answer is that Google frowns on this practice, since the pages aren't really duplicates. Since they frown on it, they may choose to simply ignore the canonical, and you'll be left with the problem. I think the general problem is that this requires a lot of extra crawling/processing on their part, so it's not that it's "black at" - it's just a pain for them.
I've typically found putting a NOINDEX on pages 2+ is more effective, even in 2014. That said, I do think rel=prev/next has become a viable option, especially if your site isn't high risk for duplicates. Rel=prev/next can, in theory, allow Google to rank any page in the series, without the negative effects of the near-duplicates.
Keep in mind that you can combine rel=prev/next and rel=canonical if you're using sorts/filters/etc. Google does support the use of rel=canonical for variants of the same search page. It gets pretty confusing and the simple truth is that they've made some mixed statements that seem to change over time.
-
The best part of adding the noindex tag is hiding the pagination pages from the search engine's search index, which will make only the highest quality pages available in the search results. This gives a signal of your website being a better one with good content. The CTR rate will be higher too.
-
Hi,
I would like to address the following part of your original query without even going to the article that you referred to:
"everyone seems to agree that you shouldn't canonicalize all pages in a series to the first page"
The reason for this is, if you canonicalize all the pages in a series to the first page, you are giving a hint to Google that only the first page is what you are concerned of and it should be indexed. With this, all the non-canonical pages will be taken out from the index which you would not want to happen especially when the content of these pages is unique.
So depending on your requirement you can opt for either a 'view all method' or 'rel=prev/next' method for your pagination requirements.
Good luck.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
Advice needed on canonical paginated pages
Hi there. I use Genesis and StudioPress themes. I recently noticed that the canonical link for blog pages points to the first page on all paginated pages, which I understand is an SEO no-no. I found some code here that adds a unique canonical link to each paginated page but for categories only. It works fine. I only have one category for my site. My question is: is there a downside (or even upside) to not having a blog page and placing a link to my category page in the navigation bar instead, using the category page as the blog page? It looks good and works. What do you think? I find it odd that this seems to be an issue across the Internet and the only solution that comes up relies on the Yoast plugin, which I don't want to use (don't want to use a plugin for SEO). Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nobody16165422281340 -
Software "card" carousel results
Hi all! Does anyone have advice for getting a software product to appear in the card results at the top of SERPs? Example https://www.google.com/search?q=budgeting+software&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS784US784&oq=budgeting+software&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2194j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 dzTpe2B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SimpleSearch0 -
How to answer for question "why xyz site is ranking for abc keyword" and not our website
Hi All, This is a layman question but would like to get a concrete answer for. I would like to know how to answer the questions like "Why our competitor is ranking for keyword ABC but not us"? What metrics or data can I showcase that gives logical answer. Please help in this regard. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avin1230 -
Should we include a canonical or noindex on our m. (mobile) pages?
According to https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details, we should include a canonicalicalize back to our desktop version of the URL, but what if that desktop URL is noindexed? Should the m. version be noindexed as well? Or is it fine to leave it as a canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Rel=canonical
I have seen that almost all of my website pages need rel=canonical tag. Seems that something's wrong here since I have unique content to every page. Even show the homepage as a rel=canonical which doesnt make sense. Can anyone suggest anything? or just ignore those issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arcade880 -
What does this kind of rel="canonical" mean?
It looks like our CMS may not be configured correctly as there is an empty section in the rel="canonical" rel="canonical" href="{page_uri}" /> Will having the above meta tag be harmful to our SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | voicesdotcom0 -
VBulletin Pagination
I've been looking for quite some time for a way of incorperating rel=next/rel=prev into my vBulletin forum however I've had no joy. I want to try and consolidate my ranking as I have a very large amount of user generated content, but not enough links. Any help would be most appreciated. P.S - I have the vbSEO software and as far as I can see, there's no way of doing it through here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Optimise0 -
If google ignores links from "spammy" link directories ...
Then why does SEO moz have this list: http://www.seomoz.org/dp/seo-directory ?? Included in that list are some pretty spammy looking sites such as: <colgroup><col width="345"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg
| http://www.site-sift.com/ |
| http://www.2yi.net/ |
| http://www.sevenseek.com/ |
| http://greenstalk.com/ |
| http://anthonyparsons.com/ |
| http://www.rakcha.com/ |
| http://www.goguides.org/ |
| http://gosearchbusiness.com/ |
| http://funender.com/free_link_directory/ |
| http://www.joeant.com/ |
| http://www.browse8.com/ |
| http://linkopedia.com/ |
| http://kwika.org/ |
| http://tygo.com/ |
| http://netzoning.com/ |
| http://goongee.com/ |
| http://bigall.com/ |
| http://www.incrawler.com/ |
| http://rubberstamped.org/ |
| http://lookforth.com/ |
| http://worldsiteindex.com/ |
| http://linksgiving.com/ |
| http://azoos.com/ |
| http://www.uncoverthenet.com/ |
| http://ewilla.com/ |0