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.
Have Your Thoughts Changed Regarding Canonical Tag Best Practice for Pagination? - Google Ignoring rel= Next/Prev Tagging
-
Hi there,
We have a good-sized eCommerce client that is gearing up for a relaunch. At this point, the staging site follows the previous best practice for pagination (self-referencing canonical tags on each page; rel=next & prev tags referencing the last and next page within the category).
Knowing that Google does not support rel=next/prev tags, does that change your thoughts for how to set up canonical tags within a paginated product category? We have some categories that have 500-600 products so creating and canonicalizing to a 'view all' page is not ideal for us. That leaves us with the following options (feel it is worth noting that we are leaving rel=next / prev tags in place):
- Leave canonical tags as-is, page 2 of the product category will have a canonical tag referencing ?page=2 URL
- Reference Page 1 of product category on all pages within the category series, page 2 of product category would have canonical tag referencing page 1 (/category/) - this is admittedly what I am leaning toward.
Any and all thoughts are appreciated! If this were in relation to an existing website that is not experiencing indexing issues, I wouldn't worry about these. Given we are launching a new site, now is the time to make such a change.
Thank you!
Joe
-
An old question, but thought I'd weigh in with to report that Google seems to be ignoring self-referring pagination canonicals on a news site that I'm working on.
Pages such as /news/page/36/ have themselves as declared canonicals, but Search Console reports that Google is selecting the base page /news/ as the canonical instead.
Would be interested to know if anyone else is seeing that.
-
Hi,
I'm also very interested in what the new best approach for pagination would be.
In a lot of webshops, option 2 is used. However, in this article the possible negative outcome of this option is described (search the article for 'Canonicalize to the first page'). In my opinion, this is particularly true for paginated blog articles, and less so for paginated results of products per category in webshops. I think the root page is the one you want to rank in the end.
What you certainly don't want, is create duplicate content. Yes, your products (and of course their links to the product pages) are different for each page. And yes, there will be also more internal links pointing to the root category page, and not to the second or third results page. But if you invested time in writing content for your category, and invested time in all the other on page optimizations, these will be the same across all your result pages.
So in the end, we leave it to Google and hope that they do recognize your pagination. Is this the best option? Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, we didn't know that they didn't use rel=next/prev for several years, and mostly it worked fine.
So I think in the end EffectDigital is right, just do nothing. If you see problems, I would try option 2, using your first results page as canonical.
-
The only thing it changes IMO is delete rel=prev / next tags to save on code bloat. Other than that, nothing changes in my opinion. It's still best to allow Google to rank paginated URLs if Google chooses to do so - as it usually happens for a reason!
I might lift the self referencing canonicals, maybe. Just leave them without directives of any kind, and force Google to determine what to do with them via URL structure ('?p=', '/page/', '?page=' etc). If they're so confident they don't need these tags now, maybe using any directives at all is just creating polluting signals that will unnecessarily interfere
In the end I think I'd just strip it all off and monitor it, see what happened
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
-
Have an eBook. What is best practice for SEO?
Hello We have a free eBook - its a great resource and great piece of content. It is available to download on our website here - http://re-timer.com/the-product/how-to-sleep-better/ The book is available as a whole or as individual chapters (i.e. http://re-timer.com/app/uploads/2015/07/Chapter8.pdf?b0df38). The PDF chapters appear to be doing well in Google search for certain keywords. I can't measure this in GA though. I would like the eBook to assist the SEO of my website overall. If I create a web page and 'embedded' the PDF into it will Google still crawl this page? At the moment we are also using this to collect email addresses, this is a nice to have and it is OK if people get the eBook without doing this (if they find a chapter in Google they currently don't have to enter their email address). I'm sure lots of people have eBooks now. What is best practice and the best way to use this as a tool to maximise SEO for the whole website (http://re-timer.com)? Thank you! Laura
Web Design | | LauraFalls1 -
Multiple websites for different service areas/business functions?
I'm wondering what the implications are for having multiple domains for different service areas of a company? I realize having multiple domains for one company can be troublesome because of the possibility of duplicate content, keyword cannibalization, and linkbuilding to multiple domains. But when the domains are for very different service offerings/unique business functions that each serve their own purpose (and have different positionings), is there a downside to having more than one domain? Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Web Design | | KevinBloom0 -
Website title next to a post title-how to remove it?
I just have checked on some of the keyword I am ranking for and found in the serp that next to the post I have also the site name. But I thought that I have remove it. Does somebody know how to remove it? perhaps I did not do it correctly. I am also using yoast seo plugin but I do not have it set there to show the site name after posts name. Can somebody help me to fix this please? I have also attached an image from the serp where is behind the post title also Villas Diani-the site name Thank you very much! Iris O1oj4W0.jpg
Web Design | | Rebeca10 -
How do I properly implement rel=me?
Is there a primer anywhere that will help me understand how rel=me works and how to implement it properly? I do NOT have a blog but I do have a Google+ account. I want to put my mug into my SERPs so I need to understand both the concept and the technical details of implementing this. I am very comfortable with markup so I will be able to do this if I understand WHAT I am doing and HOW it is done. Thanks for your help! Chris Streeter
Web Design | | DVRSystems190 -
Missing Meta Description Tag - Wordpress Tag
I am going through my crawl diagonostics issues and I have lots of "Missing Meta Description Tags". However when I look at the url's they are Wordpress Tags, which do not have a meta description. Shall I just ignore these errors or should I find a way to add a meta description? Is it important?
Web Design | | petewinter0 -
XML Sitemap that updates daily/weekly?
Hi, I have a sitemap on my site, that updates but it isn't a XML sitemap. See here: http://www.designerboutique-online.com/sitemap/ I have used some free software to crawl the site and create a sitemap of pages, however I think that if I were to upload the sitemap, it would be out of date as soon as I listed new products on the site, so would need to rerun it. Does anyone know how I can get this to refresh daily or weekly? Or any software that can do it? I have a web firm that are willing to do one, but our relationship is at an all time low and I don't want to hand over £200 for them to do one. Anyone with any ideas or advice? Thanks Will
Web Design | | WillBlackburn0 -
How do search engines interpret <hgroup>...</hgroup> tags?
Hi there. I'm building an HTML 5 site and through research of new HTML 5 elements I've seen little conclusive information about the interpretation of the new <hgroup>tag, in terms of SEO application and interpretation. In particular does Google interpret the nested heading tags as individual elements or does it combine them into one entity? For example, say I have: <hgroup> # Article Heading ## Article Sub-heading </hgroup> How is this interpreted by Google and what would be some good SEO best practices regarding the <hgroup>tag in HTML5: Is it interpretted as a single tag (" Article Heading: Article Sub-heading ") or two separate heading tags (one and one )? Also, how much does the ordering of the tags matter (say for example I wanted something like the following for visual purposes? <hgroup> ## Article Sub-heading # Article Heading </hgroup> One last thing: is it safe to assume that it is indeed OK to have multiple tags on a single page (as referenced by Matt Cutts a while back in a Webmaster Video)? Thanks! </hgroup> </hgroup>
Web Design | | LMDNYC2 -
IP block in Google
Our office has a number of people performing analysis and research on keyword positions, volume, competition etc. We have 1 external static IP address. We installed the static IP so we can filter out our visits in Google Analytics. However by 10 AM we get impssible CAPTCHA's or even get blocked in Google. Do you have any experience with such an issue? Any solutions you can recommend? Any help would be appreciated! SXI5A.png
Web Design | | Partouter0