Blog Page Titles - Page 1, Page 2 etc.

[O2C]

Hi All,

I have a couple of crawl errors coming up in MOZ that I am trying to fix.

They are duplicate page title issues with my blog area.

For example we have a URL of www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/1 and as we have quite a few blog posts they get put onto another page, example www.ourwebsite.com/blog/page/2 both of these urls have the same heading, title, meta description etc.

I was just wondering if this was an actual SEO problem or not and if there is a way to fix it.

I am using Wordpress for reference but I can't see anywhere to access the settings of these pages.

Thanks

[Paul-Gross]

I am having this very problem but it is probably a fundamental misunderstanding of search engines so bear with me.

I have used Yoast SEO to turn on "noindex, follow" for archives and categories but not for www.cpresearch.net/blog.  The reason is that I am presuming that indexing the blog is necessary to find posts besides the current ones.  If that is not the case, what link is Google following to find the cannonicalized posts after they scroll from the one I list on the homepage.  And do I need to be indexed by Google daily to make sure my cannonicalized URLs are indexed?  I fear they will be orphaned...

Thanks for any insight.

[O2C]

Thanks for clearing this up.

It sounds like noindexing might actually make the most sense then.

Thanks everyone!

Regards

[DirkC]

If you put noindex/follow the pages /2, /3 etc will not be indexed - however the blogposts they are linking to will be indexed (as Google will follow the links).

Most cases pages just containing links to blog articles have little value as landing pages - that's why I think that the noindex/ follow is more appropriate. Next/Previous is normally meant for articles cut in several pieces (publishers do this a lot to increase pageviews = bigger inventory)

Without knowing your site it's difficult to judge which is the best solution.

Dirk

[Ria_]

But if pages 2/3/etc are displaying duplicate content from your actual blog posts, then why would you want the paginated pages indexed by Google?

Ask yourself: what do I expect people to Google to land on page 2 of my blog, and would I rather they land on a blog post instead? If the pages 2/3/etc provide no value to searchers and only serve as navigation for users, why confuse Google by keeping them indexed?

[O2C]

Yes, surely noindexing them would mean that our content in the blog posts on those pages wasnt being read by the search engine? Not ideal by any means!

I will look into the rel next/previous option.

Thank you for your input.

[DirkC]

In addition to Ria's answer - make them noindex/follow.

If these pages (2/3...etc) would have any value to be included in the SERP's you could consider using rel next/previous - indicating that these pages belong together and should be considered as one page. The way I understand your question - the noindex/follow is probably a better solution.

Dirk

[Ria_]

This shouldn't be too much of an issue at all really.

My recommendation would be to noindex these /page/2 etc pages if you're using Wordpress. Various Wordpress plugins are available that allow you to do this easily. My favourite is Yoast SEO - you can noindex those pages and tag pages too. If you use tags, this would be more of an SEO concern than the paginated pages.