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Sorry for confusions. By search results I thought you might have been specifically talking about putting keywords into a site search and getting the results page. I've noindexed that page.

What you've said makes sense.

Thanks Peter.

Yes, it's the latter instance that I was talking about.

Thanks Peter.

Thanks Peter.

Just to clarify: I'm not talking about search results pages. I'm talking about paginated category pages. I've honestly had a number of cases where sites have linked to those 2nd or 3rd pages. Weird, I know.

Anyway, it's only a few links so I'm not too concerned about it.

Cheers.

Hi Alan, that wasn't my understanding of how it worked. I thought the "follow" part in this only permitted the bots to literally follow those links to other pages, and no link juice passes through. Maybe I misunderstood that?

Thanks Peter. One other advantage I can think that the rel=prev/next has: if someone is looking at products on a site and they are on the 2nd or 3rd page, they might decide to link to the page. This will pass the link juice to that page (or collection of pages) whereas if the page was noindexed, it would be a wasted link.

Cheers,

Thanks Peter. I hadn't seen Google's official advise on this. Having thought about it again, it does make more sense as I think it would be quite messy trying to get the rel next prev tags pointing to the non parameter urls. It's good to know that the canonical tag works in conjunction with these tags to point to the correct url.

I know it's easier to just no index those pages, but doesn't that mean you leak link juice that goes to those pages? Telling Google that they are a part of a series and having all that link juice combined into a single page should mean a more powerful page?

Thanks Peter.

Thanks Dan. I use Yoast's Wordpress SEO. It's a great plugin. I have the author archive disabled.

We don't actually link the author's name to an author page, so I think we're ok there. Thanks for the clarification.

Thanks Willny. Can you clarify what you mean by "Unless the links are going to the author's list of posts"?

Hi,

I've a number of wordpress posts that were written by different authors, and I want to merge them into a single author. If Google sees that originally the post was rel authored to person A and later we change the author reference to person B, will Google see this as suspicious in any way?

Or does it not matter, as long as it's only attributed to a single author at any one time?

Thanks,

Leigh