Solving 'duplicate content' for page 2 of X for 1 blog post

[DanielMulderNL]

Hi to all SEO wizards,

For my Dutch blog google-plus-marketing.nl I'm using WordPress Genesis framework 2.0 with news theme pro 2.0 responsive theme. I love the out of the box SEO friendliness and features. One of those features is that it allows for a blog post or page to be divided into several pages. This results in MOZ signaling duplicate titles for all pages after the 1st page.

Now I was thinking that a canonical url set to the first page should do the trick for me as I reason that the rank will go the the first page and the rest will not be seen as duplicates. Genesis does some good stuff on it's own and places the following meta tags in the header for the first page. All looks well and my question is about the same meta tags for the 2nd page and higher that I pasted below this one for the 1st page.

Meta tags page 1 of X for blog post

Meta tags page 2 of X for the same blog post

Would it not be better to point the canonical url for page 2 till X to always point to the first page? In this case:

[DanielMulderNL]

Hi Carson-Ward,

That's a nice and clean solution. Thanks for that!

I actually did something similar without realizing it by creating an actual canonical file to start with for my latest guide Google My Business which in Dutch is Google Mijn Bedrijf handleiding google-plus-marketing.nl/google-mijn-bedrijf-handleiding/ I have had the nr 1 position ever since it launched a week (or has it been 2 already? Dont know:) or so ago. I made it in to one large file not linking out to anything for the first week accept one strategic link to the google.com help file. This was mend as the canon indeed. Instead here I chose to optimize the category page for Google My Business and not a bulky paginated file or something like that. This category page now ranks 3 to 5th places since Google My Business is released so it's working I guess. The category page which I consider a basic keyword theme landing page -> google-plus-marketing.nl/category/google-mijn-bedrijf/

me really happy with traffic I get from it:) I think I prefer the patter approach for now above a nicely paginated multi page posts.

I experimented with this one first last few months and although it looks better it does not rank better to start with google-plus-marketing.nl/google-plus-handleiding-inhoudsopgave/ although it's ranked 1-3 for months I think simple version is best?

[Carson-Ward]

Hi Daniel,

Sorry for the delay in getting to your question. TL;DR I would not recommend using a canonical to point paginated content to page 1.

Rel next and prev (or are more appropriate for this situation than a canonical tag. If you use a canonical tag it probably won't hurt you, but Google will likely ignore it because the content is not the same at all. There have been cases where the content on pages 2+ is completely ignored because you're telling Google to only look at P1, so you have potentially useful content that doesn't help you. Long story short, I'd create a version with all of the content (I prefer this) to canonical to OR use next/prev.

My guess is that Google already understands pagination on your site, with or without rel="next" and rel="prev". You can test by Googling the exact title of your blog post with the site: command to see whether all three pages show up. It's probably only the first page that shows up, but you may as well add the tags to make sure things are working correctly.