Canonical pagination content
-
Hello
We have a large ecommerce site, as you are aware that ecommerce sites has canonical issues, I have read various sources on how best to practice canonical on ecommerce site but I am not sure yet..
My concert is pagination where I am on category product listing page.. the pagination will have all different product not same however the meta data will be same so should I make let's say page 2 or 3 to main category page or keep them as is to index those pages?
Another issue is using filters, where I am on any page and I filter by price or manufacturer basically the page will be same so here It seems issue of duplicate content, so should I canonical to category page only for those result types?
So basically If I let google crawl my pagination content and I only canonical those coming with filter search result that would be best practice? and would google webmaster parameter handling case would be helpful in this scenario ?
Please feel free to ask in case you have any queries
regards
Carl -
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 from your series pages. 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 checked your site, and don't know whether you already changed it or not, but it looks pretty good. I have dealt with much more hardcore issues, meaning where you have tons of products in each category, several filters which can be freely permutated, and in the meantime you were able to paginate as well. There were a lot of canonical issues, so your case is an easy ride, believe me.
Here are a few tips, and I reason why I suggest them:
1) cutting back your navigation on deeper pages
I just quickly checked how many links is included in your site-wide navigation with Google Spreadsheet:
=ImportXML("http://www.cnmonline.co.uk/Dehumidifiers-c-778.html","//h6/a/@href")
And it got back 142 links. Whoa, thats a lot. And that many links are included in all of your pages, and the navigation is placed BEFORE your content. I had this very same issue with a client, they were hesitating to change the navigation, but eventually it helped them, a lot.
The suggested solution:
- wipe out the drop menu links from deeper pages
- only link to the big categories: "Air Treatment", "Bathroom", ... "Cleaning Products"
- in the category you are in, you can link to subcategories (without any javascript/css drop menu, just simply list them beneath the main category with a different background than darkblue), for example if you are in the Bathroom category, your left navigation will look like:
- Air Treatment
- Bathroom
- Electric Showers
- Mirror Demister
- Bathroom Heaters
- Heated Towel Rails
- Catering Equipment
- ...
- Cleaning Products
So this way you don't have to change a lot in your navigation, and it will make your interlinking more consistent. Furthermore if a user wants to find an another category, there is the search box, the main categories, and the breadcrumb. Which leads to the next suggestion:
2) Make the breadcrumb look like a breadcrumb, not like a tab.
This is just a personal feeling, but now it looks like a tab rather than a breadcrumb. These add up resulting in my feeling: "item1 | item 2 | item3" without underlining the links (so they not looking and feeling like links), and not beginning at the left side of the site, instead next to the left navigation.
Suggested solution:
- move your breadcrumb to the very left side of your site, above your navigation box, you can position it to start from the left side as your navigation box starts (it looks like 15px padding from the left side of the white background)
- the text can be smaller, but make the links underlined, to look like links
- change the pipeline ("|") character with a greater than character (">"), that's much more like a breadcrumb
3) make your pagination link follow, and the pagination pages meta "follow,noindex"
Now at the moment you have nofollowed your pagination links, which results in lower indexation between your product pages than it would possible.
Eg:
- this is cached: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.cnmonline.co.uk/Bathroom-Products-c-2278.html&hl=en&strip=1
- but the 2nd page isn't: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.cnmonline.co.uk%2FBathroom-Products-c-2278-p-2.html
- and whats even worse, but not surprising, this item on the second page isn't indexed: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.cnmonline.co.uk%2FSavoy-Shawl-Collar-Bath-Robe-Box-of-5-pr-36295.html
Suggested solution:
- let the google bot follow your pagination links, remove the rel nofollow attribute from the links
- make the pagination pages meta robots "follow,noindex"
This change means the google bot can follow your product pages, but won't index those paginated pages. This is awesome, since you don't want to hassle with unique title, description, and the pagination pages are just lists, they don't give any additional value or any reason to be indexed.
Of course if you had pagination issue with reviews, then it would be a whole different story, because then each paginated pages would be valuable, since they are listing valuable user generated content, and not just essentially linking to product pages. So in that case, you might create unique titles and description at least by adding "page X".
4) Your filters aren't causing duplication / canonical issue, since they work on an ajax basis, and they don't create any new url.
So here you shouldn't change anything, but I guess this don't surprise you. You can always check this, by using 'cache:' in google and selecting text-only version, for example: "cache:http://www.cnmonline.co.uk/Bathroom-Heaters-c-2320.html", click text-only version, and you will see that Price Range and Manufacturer have no links which google could follow, so no canonical problem.
Hope this helps.
-
Is it best method to get canonical url redirect with paging to view all pages including all the urls coming with price and sorting filters? any other members would like to share their opinions?
regards
Carl
-
View all! Of course... how did I not think of that before? Thank you.
-
Concerning Pagination,
I would create a "view all" where all the products are listed under this category. then i add rel canonical linking to the "View All " page.
its can help you with your first question and for the issue using filters.
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
-
Content from Another Site
Hi there - I have a client that says they'll be "serving content by retrieving it from another URL using loadHTMLFile, performing some manipulations on it, and then pushing the result to the page using saveHTML()." Just wondering what the SEO implications of this will be. Will search engines be able to crawl the retrieved content? Is there a downside (I'm assuming we'll have some duplicate content issues)? Thanks for the help!!
Technical SEO | | NetStrategies1 -
Duplicate Content
HI There, Hoping someone can help me - before i damage my desk banging my head. Getting notifications from ahrefs and Moz for duplicate content. I have no idea where these weird urls have came from , but they do take us to the correct page (but it seems a duplicate of this page). correct url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/Antique-Vintage-Rings-c152.htm Incorrect url http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/vintage-Vintage-Rings- c152.htm This is showing for most of our store categories 😞 Desperate for help as to what could be causing these issues. I have a technical member of the ecommerce software go through the large sitemap files and they assured me it wasn't linked to the sitemap files. Gemma
Technical SEO | | acsilver0 -
Issue with duplicate content
Hello guys, i have a question about duplicate content. Recently I noticed that MOZ's system reports a lot of duplicate content on one of my sites. I'm a little confused what i should do with that because this content is created automatically. All the duplicate content comes from subdomain of my site where we actually share cool images with people. This subdomain is actually pointing to our Tumblr blog where people re-blog our posts and images a lot. I'm really confused how all this duplicate content is created and what i should do to prevent it. Please tell me whether i need to "noindex", "nofollow" that subdomain or you can suggest something better to resolve that issue. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | odmsoft0 -
Pagination and Canonocal Issue
Hi, I have a site which have city wise pages and in a given city we have categories. The listed products can be listed in different categories which have separate URL. The site have different URL, meta, title for each category. We want to Rank these pages based on category also... What is best way to avoid duplicate and canonical issue.. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | dsingh1079
Darshan..0 -
External video content in iframe
Hi, On our site we have a lot of video content. The player is hosted by a third party so we are using an iframe to include the content on our site. The problem is that the content it self (on the third party domain) is shown in the google result. My question is: Can we ask the third party to disallow the content from indexing in their robots.txt or will that also affect our own use of the video content? For example we use video-sitemaps to include the videos in Google video search (the sitemap links to the videos on our own domain, but we are still using iframes on the pages to collect the content from the third party domain that will then be blocked by robots.txt). I hope you understand what I mean... Any suggestions? Thanks a lot!
Technical SEO | | Googleankan0 -
Canonical Question
Can someone please help me with a question, I am learning about Canonical URls at the moment and have had some errors come up, it is saying ```![Priority 1](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/Report/p1.png)This page has multiple rel=canonical tags.Line 9 Best Practice[![](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/Report/dropbox.png)](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/res/2.view.htm#)![Help](http://try.powermapper.com/Reports/89db420a-2cf2-46dc-bae4-543efbefc241/report/Report/help.png)Search engine behavior is unpredictable when a page has multiple canonical tags. <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/" /><link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Final Duties – Low cost probate RSS Feed" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/feed/" /> <link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Final Duties – Low cost probate Atom Feed" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/feed/atom/" /><link rel="pingback" href="http://www.finalduties.co.uk/xmlrpc.php" />That canonical link to Feed? should that be there, I know the Plugin has done this but I am lost to what should be there, I have no duplicate pages as far as I am aware than needs a canonical URL ??Thanks ``` >
Technical SEO | | Chris__Chris0 -
Duplicate Content Vs No Content
Hello! A question that has been throw around a lot at our company has been "Is duplicate content better than no content?". We operate a range of online flash game sites, most of which pull their games from a feed, which includes the game description. We have unique content written on the home page of the website, but aside from that, the game descriptions are the only text content on the website. We have been hit by both Panda and Penguin, and are in the process of trying to recover from both. In this effort we are trying to decide whether to remove or keep the game descriptions. I figured the best way to settle the issue would be to ask here. I understand the best solution would be to replace the descriptions with unique content, however, that is a massive task when you've got thousands of games. So if you have to choose between duplicate or no content, which is better for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ryan_Phillips0 -
Problem with duplicate content
Hi, My problem is this: SEOmoz tells me I have duplicate content because it is picking up my index page in three different ways: http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/ and http://www.web-writer-articles.co.uk/index.php Can someone give me some advice as to how I can deal with this issue? thank you for your time, louandel15
Technical SEO | | louandel150