Hi Lesley,

Interesting indeed, I'd agree with the colours etc. having a canonical as essentially it would be Duplicated but when writing I was assuming unique products under each category (e.g. TV's each with different size or brand). This might also encompass filters etc. but it depends on how far down that road you want to go. I assume Tom's problem is more for just a categories with X pages all with unique things in. Hopefully you find the above somewhat helpful Tom!

Good conversation thanks Lesley.

I still disagree, a middle ground might be a view all section that you can canonical the downside might be some page load speeds but there are some ways to reduce that. I had a quick look for my self and found that Walmart seems to have updated their game  http://i.imgur.com/RvMboWG.png

A few of the examples you posted are more filters(Query string) than they are true pagination but I get what your leaning towards.

We're also an e-commerce specialist, the problem with copying bigger companies is if something goes wrong they can afford to get through it, can you? Just because they are a bigger company doesn't mean they know better, don't follow what everyone else is doing try to set your self apart, it is possible to set meta tags on paginated content, create more content to make each page unique etc. if 99% of the CMS's you found didn't do it keep looking for the 1% as it is possible

Finally I'll point to Rands own blog here - https://moz.com/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience

"Whatever you do, DO NOT:

• Put a rel=canonical directive on paginated results pointing back to the top page in an attempt to flow link juice to that URL. You'll either misdirect the engines into thinking you have only a single page of results or convince them that your directives aren't worth following (as they find clearly unique content on those pages)."

Thanks for the reply I enjoyed reading your thoughts on the above, i guess I'm somewhat stuck in my ways for pagination and canonical tags!

Hope some of the above helps Tom.

Hi Tom,

To break it down into the two areas:

Option A

Pagination - Google recommends this option it involves a similar set up that you have at the moment (the above links can help with this) you might find you canonical each page to its self perhaps but for the most part canonical is not used. Pros of this is its within Google guidelines and all content is indexed, the negative is that all the content is indexed and you might not have a way to get the page you want ranked (but you can tweak this)

Option B

You canonical all the pagination pages to a category page, this is not within Google guidelines as the pages are not duplicated nor would they really have duplicated content (with some exceptions). This bonus of this is technically you can sculpt all the link juice from all the pages to one place but the negative of this is you don't have a lot of content indexed.

Personal I'm in favor of option A, its in the guidelines its what the whole thing was designed for and if done correctly shouldn't cause you too many problems. The second option whilst i can work can also backfire especially if you not a large company and like most things is a matter of weighing up the pros and cons.

Hope that somewhat helps give you an idea. Really with the canonical (with some exceptions) its an either or scenario.

You shouldn't use both as the canonical tag kinda cancels out the pagination which is not ideal.It means some of the products wont be getting indexed, you can always create a view all page and aim to make that the main ranking page however its never a garuntee. The pagination sounds like its the best option to me. All that is happening is Google is giving what it thinks is the best results by trying to sculpt it you might cause more problems than its worth.

Edit okay just to expand some more, you may want to read some more into pagination here - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

it should help you clear up getting ti correct.

Hi Tom,

You may find the following helpful - :http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

In short if you do canonical you would loose the pages (sort of) as technically they are not duplicated. You could try a "view all" page and hope that replaces some of the problems.

Seems to be pagination is working fine on your site so I wouldn't worry too much, if you did add canonical it may do more harm than good for the sake of making a URL look more appealing.

Hope that somewhat helps.

Good luck.

You can go to

Acquisition>referralsto find out where they might be coming from.I can imagine a lot of the visits are from GA code ghosting which is from sites like free-share-buttons.com etc. these can be filtered out of your reports etc. if it bugs you. Its a bit of a problem of late and bugs the heck out of me. Let me know if it is a lot of spammy looking referrals

Hello guys and gals,

This is a very odd one, I've a client's website and most of the crawlers I'm using are giving me weird/ wrong results.

For now lets focus on screaming frog, when I crawl the site it will list e.g. meta titles as missing (not all of them though), however going into the site the title is not missing, and Google seems to be indexing the site fine. The robots.txt are not affecting the site (I've also tried changing the user agent).

The other odd thing is SF gives a 200 code but as a status tells me "connection refused" even though it's giving me data.

I'm unable to share the clients site, has any one else seen this very odd issue? And solutions for it?

Many thanks in advanced for any help,

Google picks the page it thinks is most relevant for the search, so you can look at why you think your homepage is more relevant than the other page, is this from meta tags, content (including keywords), robots, links etc.

It may be a matter of making the teeth whitening page more appealing to Google this can be via some content really drilling down that niche etc.

If you're having problems you can always try to direct users from the homepage to the correct page which will in tern help Google understand the right page etc.

Hope that gives you some insight that helps you a bit.

Also one more thing you can look into is http://www.alexa.com/ whilst not 100% its a good starting place for finding some popularity on sites (using data from people etc.)

Worth a look at for some indicators but most of the time you're going to be working with guess work i'm afraid.

I'm sure you've gone over this and if so feel free to ignore me but did you make sure your sitemap is up to scratch - https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/184732?hl=en

You can also look to see if your data is up to par - https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/

You can always work back from the date it stopped working see if you've done anything that may have caused this (some one changing a tag etc.) lastly there is always the giant list of things to check for Google news - http://www.adamsherk.com/seo/the-most-common-google-news-errors/

Best of luck and let us know how you get on.