Pagination new pages vs parameters
-
I'm working on a site that currently handles pagination like this
cars-page?p=1 cars-page?p=2
In webmaster tools I can then tell ?p= designates pagination
However I have a plugin I want to add to fix other seo issues, among those it adds rel="prev" rel="next" and it modifies the pagination to this
cars-page-1.html cars-page2.html
Notice I lost the parameter here and now each page is a different page url, pagination is no longer a parameter. I will not longer be able to specify the pagination parameter in webmaster tools. Would this confuse google as the pagination is no longer a parameter and there will now be multiple urls instead of one page with parameters?
My gut says this would be bad, as I haven't seen this approach often on ecommerce site, but I wanted to see what the community thought?
-
Thank you for the replies!
It is a strange plug-in, but the newest version of Magento Enterprise 2.2.3 and all 2.1 and 2.2 aren't any better. It's really messed up how they handle pagination, whomever coded Magento really didn't understand how it's supposed to work and didn't read the Google documentation. The plugin is better but not perfect either.
I agree keeping the current structure would be better, I've reached out to the developer to see if they're willing to make a change to the plug-in to keep the original structure. In testing I found it doesn't 301 the old URLs to the new URLs if you switch over so that's really going to create some issues I feel like
-
What a weird plugin!
Like Gaston said, Google can deal with pagination that's on separate pages, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a period where they crawled/indexed too many pages.
Is there an option in your plugin to keep things the way they are?
-
Hi keith,
As google says they honor next/prev signals there whould not be any problem with your pagination. Keep in mind that it could take some time to completely understand the new structure and start showing the correct results. For a 10k pages ecommercer, i'd say about 6-8 weeks.
Also, please make sure that those pagination tags are implemented correctly.
Here some resources:Indicate paginated content - Search Console Help
SEO Guide to Google Webmaster Recommendations for Pagination - Moz Blog
Pagination & SEO: Best practices - YOASTHope it helps.
Best Luck.
GR.
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
-
How can I avoid duplicate content for a new landing page which is the same as an old one?
Hello mozers! I have a question about duplicate content for you... One on my clients pages have been dropping in search volume for a while now, and I've discovered it's because the search term isn't as popular as it used to be. So... we need to create a new landing page using a more popular search term. The page which is losing traffic is based on the search query "Can I put a solid roof on my conservatory" this only gets 0-10 searches per month according to the keyword explorer tool. However, if we changed this to "replacing conservatory roof with solid roof" this gets up to 500 searches per month. Muuuuch better! The issue is, I don't want to close down and re-direct the old page because it's got a featured snippet and sits in position 1. So I'd like to create another page instead... however, as the two are effectively the same content, I would then land myself in a duplicate content issue. If I were to put a rel="canonical" tag in the original "can I put a solid roof...." page but say the master page is now the new one, would that get around the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
How critical is page speed: average vs fast is it worth the effort?
Hi most of our pages are rated as "medium" for optimisation by the google page speed tool and with an average speed of 2.5 seconds compared to my competitors whose pages are rates as "fast" and have a speed of less than 1 second! We use the DNN platform & my web dev has said that he cant squeeze anymore from the platform and that to get the same speed as my competitors will need a platform development which it out of our control. My question is, is it worth moving our site to another platform that can achieve these fast speeds or is the difference between medium and fast not worth it - i am mainly looking at it from a google ranking signal perspective. Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
New page disappeared from the ranks, under dubious circumstances
I've had an odd situation happen today. Published a blog post and it ranked No 6 within 2 or 3 hours, just come back now (About 12 hours later) and it has completely vanished! I have checked to page 9, and used a couple of keyword tools and it appears nowhere! It didn't have any back links, but it was unique and high quality. I have checked on the page does still exist and it is still readable. Any thoughts would be gratefully received.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
Want to merge high ranking niche websites into a new mega site, but don't want to lose authority from old top level pages
I have a few older websites that SERP well, and I am considering merging some or all of them into a new related website that I will be launching regardless. My old websites display real estate listings and not much else. Each website is devoted to showing homes for sale in a specific neighborhood. The domains are all in the form of Neighborhood1CityHomes.com, Neighborhood2CityHomes.com, etc. These sites SERP well for searches like "Neighborhood1 City homes for sale" and also "Neighborhood1 City real estate" where some or all of the query is in the domain name. Google simply points to the top of the domain although each site has a few interior pages that are rarely used. There is next to zero backlinking to the old domains, but each links to the other with anchor text like "Neighborhood1 Cityname real estate". That's pretty much the extent of the link profile. The new website will be a more comprehensive search portal where many neighborhoods and cities can be searched. The domain name is a nonsense word .com not related to actual key words. The structure will be like newdomain.com/cityname/neighborhood-name/ where the neighborhood real estate listings are that would replace the old websites, and I'd 301 the old sites to the appropriate internal directories of the new site. The content on the old websites is all on the home page of each, at least the content for searches that matter to me and rank well, and I read an article suggesting that Google assigns additional authority for top level pages (can I link to that here?). I'd be 301-ing each old domain from a top level to a 3rd level interior page like www. newdomain/cityname/neighborhood1/. The new site is better than the old sites by a wide margin, especially on mobile, but I don't want to lose all my top positions for some tough phrases. I'm not running analytics on the old sites in question, but each of the old sites has extensive past history with AdWords (which I don't run any more). So in theory Google knows these old sites are good quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gogogomez0 -
Redirecting thin content city pages to the state page, 404s or 301s?
I have a large number of thin content city-level pages (possibly 20,000+) that I recently removed from a site. Currently, I have it set up to send a 404 header when any of these removed city-level pages are accessed. But I'm not sending the visitor (or search engine) to a site-wide 404 page. Instead, I'm using PHP to redirect the visitor to the corresponding state-level page for that removed city-level page. Something like: if (this city page should be removed) { header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rriot
header("Location:http://example.com/state-level-page")
exit();
} Is it problematic to send a 404 header and still redirect to a category-level page like this? By doing this, I'm sending any visitors to removed pages to the next most relevant page. Does it make more sense to 301 all the removed city-level pages to the state-level page? Also, these removed city-level pages collectively have very little to none inbound links from other sites. I suspect that any inbound links to these removed pages are from low quality scraper-type sites anyway. Thanks in advance!2 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Google is displaying my pages path instead of URLS (Pages name)
Does anyone knows why Google is displaying my pages path instead of the URL in the search results, i discoverd that while am searching using a keyword of mine then i copied the link http://www.smarttouch.me/services-saudi/web-services/web-design and found all related results are the same, could anyone one tell me why is that and is it really differs? or the URL display is more important than the Path display for SEO!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ali8810 -
Category pages in forums
I would like to hear feedback on the best SEO practice for forum category pages. An example would be a forum about cars. You can have a Chervorlet category which contains forums for every chevy model. Often this category page is simply a list of all the forums. If I noindex, follow the page then am I missing an opportunity? I am thinking of Google sitemaps for example where this page can be used for a category link. If I noindex the page, there probably isn't another great place for a sitemap to link to. I could fill out the page with wiki-like generic chevy information. Please share any thoughts or best practices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0
