Solving pagination issues for e-commerce

[Jseddon92]

I would like to ask about a technical SEO issue that may cause duplicate content/crawling issues.

For pagination, how the rel=canonical, rel="prev" rel="next" and noindex tag should be implemented.

Should all three be within the same page source?

Say for example, for one particular category we may have 10 pages of products (product catalogues). So we should noindex page 2 onwards, rel canonical it back to the first page and also rel="prev" and rel="next" each page so Google can understand they contain multiple pages.

If we index these multiple pages it will cause duplicate content issues. But I'm not sure whether all 3 tags need adding.

It's also my understanding that the search results should be noindexed as it does not provide much value as an entry point in search engines.

[McTaggart]

I have found this useful in the past: https://www.ayima.com/guides/conquering-pagination-guide.html

[Jseddon92]

Thanks for your advice, I will take a look at the Google webmaster video you've referenced. As we try to rank for specific search terms in our main categories, we put content in there so it can be indexed and it's great for user experience. That's why I was thinking to also implement the rel=canonical tag so the content wasn't duplicated over a series of 10 pages, but if we noindex and use the rel=prev and next tags, that should solve the issue. It's the same for filterable results really, as the content on the page can be duplicated when users choose to filter by specific options, such as size or colour.

[LoganRay]

Hi Joshua,

You will need all 3 of those tags to properly markup your pagination, just not all at the same time.

Page=1 should have a canonical to the base URL (no page=X), and a rel="next" for page 2. Page 2 will have prev tag for the base level URL, and next for page 3. And so on.

Google says they don't index paginated URLs anymore, but I prefer to play it safe and implement these tags anyway.

Regarding this comment: "It's also my understanding that the search results should be noindexed as it does not provide much value as an entry point in search engines." There is some validity to this, but honestly, it's your preference. I lean on the side of preventing indexing of search results. I don't see much value in those pages being indexed, and if you're doing SEO properly, you're already providing solid entry points. Those pages will also use up a lot of your crawl budget, so that's something to consider too. Chances are, there are better sections of your site that you'd prefer bots spend their time on.

[DirkC]

You shouldn't use rel canonical for pagination - it's main use is to avoid duplicate content issues. It's possible to combine it with rel next/prev but in very specific cases - example can be found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en :

rel="next" and rel="prev" are orthogonal concepts to rel="canonical". You can include both declarations. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain:

=> as you can see the canonical is used to strip the sessionid which could cause duplicate content issues - not to solve the pagination issue

With rel next/previous you indicate to google that the sequence of pages should be considered as one page - which makes sense if you have like 4/5 pages max. If you have a huge number of pages in a pagination this doesn't really make sense. In that case you could just decide to do nothing - or only have the first page indexed - and the other pages have a noindex/follow tag.

Hope this clarifies.

Dirk