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    4. NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?

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    NOINDEX listing pages: Page 2, Page 3... etc?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • Peter264
      Peter264 last edited by

      Would it be beneficial to NOINDEX category listing pages except for the first page.  For example on this site:

      http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/101/fsx-missions/

      Has lots of pages such as Page 2, Page 3, Page 4... etc:

      http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aflyawaysimulation.com+fsx+missions

      Would there be any SEO benefit of NOINDEX on these pages?  Of course, FOLLOW is default, so links would still be followed and juice applied.

      Your thoughts and suggestions are much appreciated.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • dunklea
        dunklea last edited by

        We've taken the approach of adding rel="canonical" to all paginated content with the link pointing to the first page of results. We keep everything indexed and followed. We also help Google identify the URL parameter created for paginated content in our Webmaster Tool settings.

        This has worked well for us, but another approach would be to add rel="next" and rel="prev" to the paginated links. This is openly supported by Google to handle pagination, but might be a little tricky to setup in your CMS.

        Good luck!

        Andrew

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • gmk1567
          gmk1567 last edited by

          Noindex will take out the pages from the index of search engines. This will impact your traffic if your pages are already ranked.

          As long as the category pages have different content, you will be fine. No need to remove them from the index unless you have specific requirement to do so.

          For some reason, if you want only the first page to be ranked then go with the pagination hints which will consolidate your link value to the first page and most likely the first page will come up in the search result.

          Note: Bing didn't officially endorse this practice and may be on its way.

          http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

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