Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Tom,

I think you are seeing two differing view points on the issue. We only do e-commerce work, so we have gleaned our suggestions from the best practices in the e-commerce industry. I have done some pretty extensive research around this issue just to see what other companies do, that is why I suggested pointing your canonical back to your category landing pages. One issue I think is thin content. Do people really want to land on page 4 of a pagination?

With paginated category pages you actually run into a lot of SEO problems that are not addresses in 99% of all e-commerce platforms. Duplicate content, meta descriptions, and titles are some of the biggest. I am not familiar with any e-commerce package that will let you have different meta title or meta descriptions for paginated pages. Some might add "Page number x" to the title and descriptions, but that will still trigger duplicate content errors.

Lets look at what other sites in the industry do and how they do it.

Walmart

Walmart points all of their paginated pages back to the main category page. But they also do something interesting worth noting. They use rel=next on everyone as well. Even if the rel=next points to the page itself. See this screenshot of their TV category on page 2.

http://screencast.com/t/eZb9zbgA0u

If you notice the rel=next at the bottom actually points to the page you are on and the canonical points back to the category root.

Target

Target uses a filtering navigation on their category pages. It makes some really unpretty urls too. Below is a screenshot of a page 2 of their TV category.

http://screencast.com/t/oolK0hZy

They also point their category pagination back to the main category landing page as well. Also note that they do not use the rel=next or previous in their page as well.

Macy's

Macy's also points their canonical back at their category root page too. For some reason they have a query string on it as you can see in the image below. But in the next screenshot you can see where that page actually goes.

http://screencast.com/t/l3Jp2lxeBhTK

http://screencast.com/t/sDLTuAOa

Also it it is worth note that they don't use the rel next/previous on any of their pages as well.

Tiger Direct

Tiger Direct is another company that follows pretty much the same pattern as well. You can see by the image below that they point their paginated page back to the root category.

http://screencast.com/t/PsGft6CCgJ

I think the main reason of doing things like this works out two fold for companies. First you are putting more power into the category landing page and second you are providing better user experience. What does a paginated page of a category have to offer that the main page doesn't?

Sure Google might call using them the best practice, but that does not mean they will penalize you for not using them. We personally recommend to people to not use them and to point everything at the category root because that seems to be the standard in the industry. When you are trying to rank a page against other big e-commerce competitors you want to use every trick in the book to get ahead. Generally by not using this one it seems you won't.

This is the best answer. It puts you in a great position as well since it means that a lot of your competitors that are using the same feed will not show up in the SERP's as well. I would expand my monitoring out to more products though and see how you are doing with them.

Tom,

What we do with most of our clients is to point the canonical tag on paginated category pages to the root category page like you are wanting to do. It helps with duplicate content issues generated for category pages and also makes your landing page stronger. I would not use the rel next/previous with this though.

If you look around the industry at the bigger ecommerce sites this is what is done. Walmart, Target, and all of the big players with the exception of Amazon use this practice.

One tip I would give is to vary the content programatically. I know most people say this is a no-no with SEO, but it can be used effectively in a situation like this. If you could write a script that would replace words with localized words that could help. Like for example US people call them sunglasses, but people in AU call them sunnies a lot. Things like that so you can localize the language. It won't give you a huge boost, but I have seen it help.

I cannot see how it is possible since you do not control the checkout flow.

Yes, add this is doing this to your url. I hate it, that is one reason why I do not use them.

Here is an article on how to remove them, http://support.addthis.com/customer/portal/articles/1013558-removing-all-hashtags-anchors-weird-codes-from-your-urls

I am not the best with a htaccess without testing, but I think this is your trouble line

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://thedj.com.au/ [L,R=301]

It is redirecting anything from non https to your home page.

I would personally go with Square Space if the photographer is going to do everything himself. It is a lot easier to maintain and a lot less work in the end. Wordpress is easy, but it can also start getting really complicated quickly as well.

The images on Wikipedia are actually Wikimedia images and covered under the creative commons rules. You can read more about the required attribution here, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Credit_line

I personally do not think there is any penalty SEO wise in doing it. Although, I do think it will mess up the metric in GWT that shows how many pages have been submitted and how many have been indexed. I find that metric useful, so it would make it no longer useful if there are a lot of pages blocked by the robots.txt.

Facebook changed how things work, it is not possible anymore.

I would prefer this one, whatarethebestrestaurantsin.com/wa/seattle  It keeps the state ISO in the url for when you grow large enough that you start running into cities with multiple names. Plus people are lazy, they abbreviate states and I think that helps with using that url structure as well.

One factor could be your competition is not considered mobile friendly, so they are excluded and that would bring your rank up.

You might get a little quicker removal if you send them with a 410 status code. That will let Google know that the page is gone for good. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2340728/matt-cutts-on-how-google-handles-404-410-status-codes

There is one huge thing that is being missed here by both of you. The Google Insight grades on server response time. Server response time has no bearing on if a site loads 1 css file or 30 css files. It has not bearing on how many js files are loaded and if the parsing of them is deferred or not. If you follow all of the suggestions that pingdom gives you to the T, it will not affect your server response time one bit.

The only way to affect your server response time is going to be to reduce the processing time of your site. Not the loading time in the browser. To reduce your server response time you are going to have to explore server caching, mysql optimization, and things such as that.

This might help to read as well.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2383341?hl=en

http://www.blogaid.net/server-response-time-vs-page-load-time-for-google-crawl

I am not familiar with Drupal, when you say you are restructuring is that something internal in Drupal? Or does that mean you are changing the page structure of your site, like for instance moving pages around? Or are you removing some widgets and things like that from pages?

Server response time is tied to two factors. The first one is the DNS look up, the second one is the time it takes your server to generate a page and spit it out. Generally both of those can be improved without having to redesign your site. What is your site currently developed in? Is it constantly changing?

I haven't chosen to ignore a lot of the page speed recommendations personally. To me this is one area where Google has been unclear on and I have chosen to follow it the way I think they mean.

They have said that site speed is a ranking factor. But does that mean their page speed score is factored into it? I tend to think it does not. Which would you rather have, a site that loads in .5 seconds with a page speed score of 60 or one that loads in 3 seconds with a 100 page speed score? I want the first one. I use the suggestions as simple suggestions that I have to determine if they are worth the time and effort.

Do you have a link to your site, I can tell you what I would do.

I would make the links no follow. I think you could find yourself at risk for a penalty if you do not, it really just depends on how widely it is spread. But I would include the links, because they would generally be deemed helpful Especially for someone wanting a table of their site. But I would make them nofollowed links as well just to protect yourself.

I have looked for information on this in the past and come up empty handed. With page speed Google really pits you against best SEO practices. I think if you follow most of the page speed insights you can severely limit your SEO. How many images are you talking about, how does Google render the page in their fetch as Google?

I hope it did not come off like I was implying that you did, sorry if it did. I was more asking your thought on how the whole journalism system is going in so much as charging for things.

To me is has really put me in a place where I don't know where to stand on the issue. I am familiar with the content long game and having great content written. But I do feel like the Field of Dreams is not true. Some times you can have an awesome content piece, but only 100 people see, 10 share it, and they have a small network so it does not share past that. I have seen that happen to several people I work with. But on the other hand I have seen companies that might gross 20k in a month "buy" an article from a major publisher and then gross 200k that month.

Not to give too much away, but I had a client that miss-ordered a lipstick color  and ordered a very unpopular color in bulk. The manufacturer would not take it back because it was soon to be discontinued. They held on to the stock for about 8 months only selling 1-2 a month. As a last ditch effort before having a fire sale, they bought a placement in a magazine that came with a digital article too. They sold out of those 1900 units in a week. It worked, it made them more money, it got them more followers, more exposure, and they unloaded something they were just about to write off. So I know it works. I am just trying to wrap my head around it being against the rules and working so well.

I hope I didn't offend you, that is not what I was going for.

I look at you as the content guru, so I have to ask what your thoughts on paid news articles are. I know with us, we have dealt with paid articles in print or/and web format from Elle, Vogue, Huff Post, CNN, and just about every major content player for every niche. More and more it seems that if you want to be in the "hot blog" that drives traffic, there is a price.

I know it is against Google guidelines to buy follow links from these places, but I would not exactly consider them a bad neighborhood either. Especially since not every link is a paid link. It seems like a penalty would be hard to lay down against some of the big publishers without hurting a lot of innocent people.

Do you think it will help your site? Google says not to pay for links, but this is pretty much the standard of how online journalism works these days.

I second this. Whitespark is great.

Edward,

No worries, you can integrate their tracking code into your website as well without using a plugin.

I have had a couple of clients that use this system, https://tapfiliate.com/integrations/wordpress-affiliate-marketing/  They seem to like it well enough.

I have recently had Bingbot crawl a site until it almost locked the database up, so it is possible. If you have doubts whether it is Bing bot or not, take to the logs and start extracting the ip addresses. You can verify them here, http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/how-to-verify-bingbot-3905dc26

My view differs from the other views posted. I prefer to rel canonical the paginated pages to the index. The reason why is for user experience and landing page optimization. A paginated page generally if landed on from a search results in a poor user experience. Plus generally in an ecommerce shop the products are changing and moving around so it is hard to rank for anything in particular. So I have just dropped trying to rank them. I simply point the canonical on the paginated pages to the main category root.

One thing I also do is have a description and image on the category root as well, I hide that on the paginated pages to and opt for a more product centric view.

The canonical pointing back to the main category landing page can been seen in a lot of ecommerce sites these days. Like walmart, http://www.walmart.com/browse/home-improvement/air-conditioners/1072864_133032_133026?page=2&cat_id=1072864_133032_133026  This should link you to page 2 of the air conditioners category, but the canonical will take you to page 1.

You can observe the same thing with Target.com as well. Theirs is a little bit harder to paste since they use a filtered type result on their category pages, but here is one http://www.target.com/sb/car-seats-baby/-/N-5xtlxZ55pdd#navigation=true&category=5xtlx&searchTerm=&view_type=medium&sort_by=bestselling&faceted_value=55pdd&offset=60&pageCount=60&response_group=Items&isLeaf=false&parent_category_id=5xtly&custom_price=false&min_price=from&max_price=to  It cannonicals back to the main category page, even though it is actually a sub category.

As far as I know Amazon is one of the only companies that still canonicals to paginated pages.

I thought they took the affiliate site down a couple of years ago. I signed up and a week later it was removed with a redesign coming soon.

I would say using rel canonical would be the best. I am guessing your filter system is using a anchor or a hashbang? We only do ecommerce work and we typically just have the canonical of the filter page pointed to the category that is being filtered. The reason being is that you don't want to reduce the chances of the category ranking in the serps.

But honestly like Oleg said, the site would need to be seen to give a 100% best possible answer. We have used several different strategies with our clients. Some involve actually rewriting the filter urls as landing pages and trying to rank them as well.

They were being de-indexed until I did this, http://moz.com/community/q/would-this-be-considered-cloaking-and-would-it-be-a-bad-move

The images are not dynamic at all, they have static urls. The only thing that was being changes was the sub domain from www to cdn. When that happened the images started to de-index on the www sub domain, even though the cdn sub domain image had a canonical header pointing back to the www domain. You are welcome to check it out in action, the site is https://www.redwrappings.com.au/

That article touches on a lot of the issues. Here are my thoughts and you can tell me if I am incorrect in my thinking. For a couple of years the images have been on the www part of the domain, now they are on a CDN sub directory. I was trying to keep them indexed under the www part of domain so that they would keep the authority of the domain. My thoughts were if they are de-indexed under the www and re-indexed under the cdn they would have to climb their way back in the image search rankings. Basically that is what I was trying to avoid.

They are static. It is a passthrough CDN that basically strips off the www of the image url and replaces it with cdn.

Christy,

Sure thing, this is what is in place now, http://moz.com/community/q/would-this-be-considered-cloaking-and-would-it-be-a-bad-move

One thing that you should be able to do is submit links to bitly as well. Moz has a data deal with them, http://observer.com/2014/03/bitly-signs-data-licensing-deal-with-seo-giant/  I don't know if they still scrape Twitter as well or not, but you could used to tweet a link on Twitter and Moz would index it.

None of the answers really applied. I did a work around that I am not too happy with at the current time.

What is your opinion of doing everything you said but, skipping the no-index and pointing the canonical at the original publishers site?

I would be willing to bet your issue is with authority and that is why it is being corrected. I have heard (cannot remember where) that in the algorithm that Google uses for titles it normalizes things. Like if I were to make a title called "Jets and the Joan" and constantly used "Joan and the Jets" in the page, it would normalize the title. If you look at everything on the page and off the page you are using the version that Google is showing, except for your title. I think more than likely that is what is overriding the title of the page. You would need to change things like your facebook, text on site, some OG data, ect to try to work it out. It might be more trouble than it is worth unless you are thinking this is killing your click through. Also one thing you might try as an experiment is to add more words like "A Dueling Piano Duet - Felix and the Fingers" and see if the extra words cause them not to match the other version and normalize it.

Yes totally. They are tailored by geographic location and by what they think your preference is. The best bet is using a different browserr with your ip address if you are trying for local. If you are trying to gauge nationally, you might try several browsers and vpn's to get a good handle.

I would think there would be no SEO value in it. Google frowns upon paid links so I am sure they treat that directory accordingly. As far as click through value I do not know.

I am not very experienced with tumblr personally, but I am pretty sure it cannot be done because they don't give you access to what you would need. You would need access to the head section of each page so that you could put the canonical tag in.

One thing that MIGHT could work, but would be tricky and I would also consult with someone else about too, to see what they though. Is that if the url's are the same minus the sub domain, you could get apache to rewrite a canonical in the actual request header and send it over. I do not know if google would respect this, so I would ask others advice.

Do you have control over the sub domain to add a canonical to it and point the canonical to the original content?

I cannot really see a place in the market for a real one unless it is tied to an affiliate program on your end. Have you thought about setting up an affiliate program?

I would not call them the best place to get links from, but they are safe generally. I would suggest using Whitepsark.ca to find some directory sites, they list way more than anyone can tell you about. Since you are a Moz member you get a discount too, https://moz.com/perks

You do realize that bought traffic 99% of the time is bot traffic by farms in SE Asia that never actually look at your site, correct?

I have found cloudfront to be slow, I prefer a pass through cdn personally.

Cloudfare is not really seen as a CDN so I would think it would not matter actually. Plus I would imagine that Google is wise enough to know when a CDN is being used and not change how they view a sites localization because of it.