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.
Paging. is it better to use noindex, follow
-
Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category
or just let Google index these pages
Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link
So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-)) My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site.
Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page
Thanks!
-
Hi Theo, This is an old post you commented on, but I wanted to expand on the question and ask your thoughts: I have a real estate website where I show MLS listings (properties for sale shared by Realtors) which means these MLS listings also exit on 100+ other real estate sites. For my various MLS result pages I use rel=prev / next for paginated pages. Now, here is the question: should I also ad a "no index, follow" on these paginated pages? According to a Google blog post it said no need to use when using rel=prev / next. However, in my case these pages are very similar to other pages around the web and not original content. Yes, I know I could make more unique by adding content, but that is not what my users want. I need a simple clean look with minimal words. So, if I have a result page with 10 pages, would no index follow 9 of those pages make sense to reduce the duplicate content on my website? Or, is issue that my result page will look "thin" compared to competitors and that will impact my ranking negatively?
-
Google just announced some tags to help support pagination better. They say if you have a view all option that doesn't take too long to load, searchers generally prefer that, so you can rel=canonical to that page. However, if you don't have a view all page, then you can put these nifty rel="next" and rel="prev" tags in to let Google know your page has pagination, and where the next and previous pages are.
View all: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html
next/prev: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
-
I was talking about the same concept you're describing when I mentioned category listings. The next / previous and related items sound exactly like the things that I would recommend to get links to the page > 1 items! Lastly, yes the canonical URL should be the page we're actually viewing and not always page 1.
-
What do you mean by category listings? I'm talking about category pages where each item in the category is listed.
I do link from product or item pages to each other using next, previous and related items.
Also I'm pretty sure about this but just asking, rel=canonical for page 2,3 should be that page and not page 1 ?
-
You're welcome! It is a link from one page of your website to another, thus an internal link. I don't see how noindex,follow would change that. Yes, they will receive link juice. Because of the follow in the robots tag the pages (even though they aren't indexed) still pass link juice. Like I said in my original post, it is best to have other pages (such as category listings for example) link to these items as welll though.
-
Thanks for the answer.
Does a link from a page with noindex,follow count as an internal link? Will the items on page 2 receive any link juice, if their only internal link is from a noindexed page?
What do you think?
-
From what I've read on the internet, it is best to "noindex,follow" all pages >1. This issue had bugged me for quite some time as well, and I've struggled to find good resources explaining why their solution was the best. Now that I've actually given the subject some thought, and finally managed to read some quality material on the matter, it all makes sense.
It's basically a checklist. Do you want search engines to
-
index your paginated result pages: yes / no
-
reach the items that are listed in your paginated result pages: yes / no
In most cases you don't want your paginated result pages to be indexed. With our without Panda, visitors get little value from actually viewing 'page 7' in your result pages. That actual page provides little or no value to those visitors. However, you DO want those items listed on these paginated pages to be crawled, especially when you don't have any other pages linking to them (which you should by the way). This boils down to:
-
Don't nofollow your paginated links (because you want search engine spiders to reach them)
-
Put "noindex,follow" in the meta robots tag for all pages >1 (thus page 2 and greater) so the engines will no index these paginated results, but will crawl on to the pages that are behind the listings
Good luck!
-
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
-
Is it ok to repeat a (focus) keyword used on a previous page, on a new page?
I am cataloguing the pages on our website in terms of which focus keyword has been used with the page. I've noticed that some pages repeated the same keyword / term. I've heard that it's not really good practice, as it's like telling google conflicting information, as the pages with the same keywords will be competing against each other. Is this correct information? If so, is the alternative to use various long-winded keywords instead? If not, meaning it's ok to repeat the keyword on different pages, is there a maximum recommended number of times that we want to repeat the word? Still new-ish to SEO, so any help is much appreciated! V.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vitzz1 -
Should I apply Canonical Links from my Landing Pages to Core Website Pages?
I am working on an SEO project for the website: https://wave.com.au/ There are some core website pages, which we want to target for organic traffic, like this one: https://wave.com.au/doctors/medical-specialties/anaesthetist-jobs/ Then we have basically have another version that is set up as a landing page and used for CPC campaigns. https://wave.com.au/anaesthetists/ Essentially, my question is should I apply canonical links from the landing page versions to the core website pages (especially if I know they are only utilising them for CPC campaigns) so as to push link equity/juice across? Here is the GA data from January 1 - April 30, 2019 (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages😞
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wavelength_International0 -
Few pages without SSL
Hi, A website is not fully secured with a SSL certificate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
Approx 97% of the pages on the website are secured. A few pages are unfortunately not secured with a SSL certificate, because otherwise some functions on those pages do not work. It's a website where you can play online games. These games do not work with an SSL connection. Is there anything we have to consider or optimize?
Because, for example when we click on the secure lock icon in the browser, the following notice.
Your connection to this site is not fully secured Can this harm the Google ranking? Regards,
Tom1 -
Will Reduced Bounce Rate, Increased Pages/Session, Increased Session Duration-RESULT IN BETTER RANKING?
Our relaunched website has a much lower bounce rate (66% before, now 58%) increased pages per session (1.89 before, now 3.47) and increased session duration (1:33 before, now 3:47). The relaunch was December 20th. Should these improvements result in an improvement in Google rank? How about in MOZ authority? We have not significantly changed the content of the site but the UX has been greatly improved. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan11 -
Better to use specific cities or counties for SEO geographics?
Hello SEO experts! We are encountering a difficult situation at our marketing firm with a client who wants to optimize her site for keyworks + counties, as she doesn't want to be restricted to one specific city. We have suggested alternate solutions like location pages, utilization of H2's, etc, however, she wants to know the effectiveness of using a specific city (ie: Winona, MN) vs a county (ie: Winona County, MN) for SEO purposes. The research I have conducted thus far hasn't gotten me very far, basically I'm seeing that it all comes back to what people search for (cleaning services in Winona, MN vs. cleaning services in Winona County, MN). Does anyone have any insight into this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MLTGroup0 -
Using subdomains for related landing pages?
Seeking subdomain usage and related SEO advice... I'd like to use multiple subdomains for multiple landing pages all with content related to the main root domain. Why?...Cost: so I only have to register one domain. One root domain for better 'branding'. Multiple subdomains that each focus on one specific reason & set of specific keywords people would search a solution to their reason to hire us (or our competition).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nodiffrei0 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
301 - should I redirect entire domain or page for page?
Hi, We recently enabled a 301 on our domain from our old website to our new website. On the advice of fellow mozzer's we copied the old site exactly to the new domain, then did the 301 so that the sites are identical. Question is, should we be doing the 301 as a whole domain redirect, i.e. www.oldsite.com is now > www.newsite.com, or individually setting each page, i.e. www.oldsite.com/page1 is now www.newsite.com/page1 etc for each page in our site? Remembering that both old and new sites (for now) are identical copies. Also we set the 301 about 5 days ago and have verified its working but haven't seen a single change in rank either from the old site or new - is this because Google hasn't likely re-indexed yet? Thanks, Anthony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Grenadi0