Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Paginated Pages Which Shouldnt' Exist..
-
Hi
I have paginated pages on a crawl which shouldn't be paginated:
https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs
My crawl shows:
<colgroup><col width="377"></colgroup>
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=2 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=3 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=4 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=5 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=6 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=7 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=8 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=9 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=10 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=11 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=12 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=13 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=14 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=15 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=16 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=17 |Where is this coming from?
Thank you
-
You will also have to get those URLs out of the index once you fix the rel next/prev issue. In order to do that effectively, they should return a 404 or 410 status code in the HTTP header so Google knows that they no longer exist (even though they never really did in the first place). Otherwise, it's what is known as a "soft 404" in which the page doesn't really exist, but returns a 200 (OK) status code, which is confusing to Google if you don't want them indexed.
-
Hi Becky
I can see chairs:
https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs
But the paginated versions above are not in there. (can you see them?)
All you need to do is remove this directive for pages without a page 2: rel="next" href="https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=2" > as there is no page 2 for chairs.
Regards
Nigel
-
Hi Nigel
Thanks for jumping in. I'm confused as I have found the pages on my screaming frog crawl?
This page https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs shouldn't have any pagination as there are no additional pages, but there is rel=next in the source code...
Now I'm a bit confused!
Becky
-
Yes I've just gone through every top level page too & pagination is awful, so I'm compiling a list and a case to push it.
It's pretty bad across the site, so I'll push for this to be updated. I find new issues with it all the time..
Thanks for your help!
-
Yes exactly. Even though the pages don't exist to the user, they still technically exist. If I were you, I'd take a very deep look at pagination on your site. If this is happening at scale, then fixing it could be a major improvement to your site. I took a look and it seems to be happening on all your top-level category pages like Chairs, Office Furniture, Shelving & Racking, etc.
These paginated pages are essentially a bunch of duplicate pages of your main category pages, each with a self-referencing canonical (which is the proper way to set up pagination). So Google could be extremely confused about which one to rank. In most cases, Google will rank page 1 because the use of rel="next"/rel="prev" is essentially telling Google that page 1 is the canonical version. However, you're still opening yourself up to the possibility of Google crawling all of these duplicate pages which is a huge waste on your crawl budget.
Hope that helps!
-
Hi
Thank you both.
We do have issues with our pagination which I've raised with developers, but it's taking forever to sort out. I'll flag this as well.
So even though the content on the paginated pages for Chairs doesn't exist we still need to remove the tags on these - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=10
-
If you view your source code, you'll notice you are actually using rel="next" and rel="prev" on the main category page (https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs). This is why you (and most likely Googlebot as well) are crawling these paginated pages. Even though you don't have links to the paginated pages on the main category page, they still exist and you're giving crawlers the directive (rel next / rel prev) to crawl them.
If you remove rel="next" on the category home page, that should help but you should really remove rel="next" and rel="prev" on the paginated pages as well. Unless you do that, Google will still find them and crawl them because they're aware these pages exist and they're likely indexed.
Here's a great resource on understanding pagination as well as the correct use of rel="next" and rel="prev" from Maile Ohye at Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njn8uXTWiGg
Hope this helps!
Cheers!
-Tyler -
Nice website by the way. It looks very professional. And your 49 DA is very impressive.
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Moved company 'Help Center' from Zendesk to Intercom, got lots of 404 errors. What now?
Howdy folks, excited to be part of the Moz community after lurking for years! I'm a few weeks into my new job (Digital Marketing at Rewind) and about 10 days ago the product team moved our Help Center from Zendesk to Intercom. Apparently the import went smoothly, but it's caused one problem I'm not really sure how to go about solving: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/*** is where all our articles used to sit https://help.rewind.io/*** is where all our articles now are So, for example, the following article has now moved as such: https://help.rewind.io/hc/en-us/articles/115001902152-Can-I-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind- https://help.rewind.io/general-faqs-and-billing/frequently-asked-questions/can-i-fast-forward-my-store-after-a-rewind This has created a bunch of broken URLs in places like our Shopify/BigCommerce app listings, in our email drips, and in external resources etc. I've played whackamole cleaning many of these up, but these old URLs are still indexed by Google – we're up to 475 Crawl Errors in Search Console over the past week, all of which are 404s. I reached out to Intercom about this to see if they had something in place to help, but they just said my "best option is tracking down old links and setting up 301 redirects for those particular addressed". Browsing the Zendesk forms turned up some relevant-ish results, with the leading recommendation being to configure javascript redirects in the Zendesk document head (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3) of individual articles. I'm comfortable setting up 301 redirects on our website, but I'm in a bit over my head in trying to determine how I could do this with content that's hosted externally and sitting on a subdomain. I have access to our Zendesk admin, so I can go in and edit stuff there, but don't have experience with javascript redirects and have read that they might not be great for such a large scale redirection. Hopefully this is enough context for someone to provide guidance on how you think I should go about fixing things (or if there's even anything for me to do) but please let me know if there's more info I can provide. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | henrycabrown1 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Should I 'nofollow' links between my own sites?
We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer. I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another. Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should 'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simon_realbuzz0 -
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g. Stirling
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit0 -
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4 -
Generating 404 Errors but the Pages Exist
Hey I have recently come across an issue with several of a sites urls being seen as a 404 by bots such as Xenu, SEOMoz, Google Web Tools etc. The funny thing is, the pages exist and display fine. This happens on many of the pages which use the Modx CMS, but the index is fine. The wordpress blog in /blog/ all works fine. The only thing I can think of is that I have a conflict in the htaccess, but troubleshooting this is difficult, any tool I have found online seem useless. Have tried to rollback to previous versions but still does not work. Anyone had any experience of similar issues? Many thanks K.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Found0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0