Canonical url with pagination
-
I would like to find out what is the standard approach for sections of the site with large number of records being displayed using pagination. They don't really contain the same content, but if title tag isn't changed it seem to process it as duplicate content where the parameter in the url indicating the next page is used.
For the time being I've added ' : Page 1' etc. at the end of the title tag for each separate page with the results, but is there a better way of doing it? Should I use the canonical url here pointing to the main page before pagination shows up in the url?
-
Moz crawls paginated pages even if you have added the rel="next" and rel="prev".
-
Does Moz manage crawling through Wordpress paginated posts (with tags rel="next" / "prev") ?
Since I divided long posts in two posts (page 1 and page 2) using "nextpage" feature in Wordpress, Moz shows duplicate title between page 1 and page 2. For example : https://captaincontrat.com/guide/societe-en-cours-de-formation/ and https://captaincontrat.com/guide/societe-en-cours-de-formation/2/
Thanks a lot
-
Thanks.
-
It does, although Google seems to be slightly less fond of it over time. Since I wrote my reply in March, rel=prev/next are actually beginning to be more effective. I've never seen any major issues with NOINDEX'ing pages 2+, though. In many cases, it's just a lot easier to implement.
The big issue this year is that Google sometimes just ignores deindexation signals. So, you really have to try it and see.
I'd also add that I'm talking about search pagination here, not article pagination. Rel=prev/next is a much better choice for article pagination, because the content is unique across pages. Indexing page 11 of search results isn't much of a benefit, in most cases.
-
Anyone use "no-index" and "follow" for page 2 , page 3 etc? Does this work?
-
So, I have to say that I'm actually upset about Google's recent recommendations, because they've presented them as if their simple and definitive, whereas they're actually very complicated to implement and don't always work very well. A couple of problems:
(1) Rel=prev/next is a fairly weak signal. If you're just trying to help the crawlers, it's fine. If you have issues with large-scale duplication (or have been hit with Panda), it's not a good fix, in my experience.
(2) Rel=prev/next isn't honored at all by Bing.
(3) It's actually really tough to code, especially their proposed Rel=prev/next + Rel=canonical solution.
There are a couple of other options:
(a) If you have a "View All" page (or if that's feasible without it being huge), you can rel-canonical to it from all of the paginated pages.
(b) You can META NOINDEX, FOLLOW pages 2+. I find that's a lot easier and usually more effective. Again, it depends on the severity of the problem and scope of the paginated content.
If you're not having problems and can manage the implementation, Rel=prev/next is a decent first step.
I should add that this is assuming you mean internal search results, and not content pagination (like paginated articles). With paginated search, the additional pages usually aren't a good search-user experience (Google visitors don't need to land on Page 11 of 17 of your search results), so I find that proactively managing them is a good thing. It really does depend a lot on the scope and the size of your index, though. This is a very complex issue that tends to get oversimplified.
-
These pages obviously contain different items and each page only shares the same title and meta tags.
Marcin - do you think that if I add the rel attribute that will solve the problem? Will the Moz reports actually pick it and won't mark it as Duplicate Content and Title?
-
Hi Sebastian,
actually, there's a very clean solution which is fully supported by Google - just use rel="next" and rel="prev" in your paginated links to indicate relationships between pages.
Here's a recent discussion of the best practices from Google itself, and here's another comment by Yoast (famous for his Wordpress SEO plugin).
Hope it helps.
-
I think this is going to depend on two things: 1. Your Site Structure and If you want those pages indexed.
Rand Fishkin - recommends for paginated results not to put the canonical tag pointing back to the top page, which I agree.
Site Structure
If the final pages can only be found by going through the paginated structure, you'll definitely want them followed. You'd only want to no-follow to prioritize your crawl rate, but not recommended unless you have multiple formats (see the article above).
Indexed
If the content is unique (usually blog content) and you are getting traffic to those pages from searches then it may be worthwhile to keep them indexed.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710
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
-
Should I Redirect Pagination?
Working on a redirect map for a client moving platforms and they have all of their category pagination indexed - no canonical link and no rel next/prev's on any of them. Should I redirect the pagination pages to the main category page on the new platform? Or Should I allow the pagination to de-index itself type of thing? Thoughts and experience?
Web Design | | paul-bold0 -
URL Structure's Effect on SEO
Hello all, I have a client who currently has a very poor URL structure. As it stands, their URLs are formatted in the following manner: http://www.domain.com/category/subcategory/page In all my years of SEO, however, I have always tried to implement the following format: http://www.domain.com/category/page The web designer for this particular project has been very reluctant to change the structure for obvious reasons, but I'm convinced that by modifying the URL structure, SEO will improve. I am correct in thinking this? Likewise, if I am able to get the URL structure changed, what do I need to look out for to make sure we don't lose any traction for our keyword terms? Any and all insight/suggestions is greatly appreciated. Thanks for reading!
Web Design | | maxcarnage0 -
Website Redesign - What to do with old 301 URLs?
My current site is on wordpress. We are currently designing a new wordpress site, with the same URLs. Our current approach is to go into the server, delete the current website files and ad the new website files. My current site has old urls which are 301 redirected to current urls. Here is my question. In the current redesign process, do i need to create pages for old the 301 redirected urls so that we do not lose them in the launch of the new site? or is the 301 command currently existing outside of our server so this does not matter? Thank you in advance.
Web Design | | CamiloSC0 -
When Site:Domain Search Run on Google, SSL Error Appears on One URL, Will this Harm Ranking
Greetings MOZ Community: When a site:domain search is run on Google, a very strange URL appears in the search results. The URL is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com:2082/ The page displays a "the site's security certificate is not trusted." This only appears for one URL out of 400. Could this indicate a wider problem with the server's configuration? Is this something that needs to be corrected, and if so how? Our ranking has dropped a lot in the last few months. Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Keywords in url - specific case question
There are a bunch of questions about keywords in the url and so far what I've gathered is that it's good to have them but keep it simple so it doesn't look stuffed. I'm working on redesigning some sites that were originally setup by a group who had no understanding of SEO (or perhaps I should say a misunderstanding) and spent a lot of time stuffing keywords EVERYWHERE. In some cases they weren't too far off but in others I think they just went overboard. One of the areas I'm trying to fix are the paths which leads to the following concerns. One of the sites has a basketball section and through the use of the Adwords keyword tool they determined that most people are searching for "basketball hoops". My first question is, how reliable are the monthly search numbers in the Adwords keyword tool? Are they accurate enough to warrant forming keyword strategies based on the results? As it relates to the url issue, the current tree for the basketball section of the site looks like this: /basketball (the landing page for the whole section, there are other sport specific pages as well) /basketball/hoops (goes nowhere. not sure why they didn't just go to /basketball-hoops/x for other pages) /basketball/hoops/72in-backboards (the systems are split into three different backboard sizes, these pages group them onto one overview page per size) /basketball/hoops/72in-backboards/specific-basketball-goal (the actual basketball goal details page with options to buy and such) So what I'm wondering about this setup is: does having /basketball/hoops take care of having the "basketball hoops" search term or would it be more effective to switch to /basketball-hoops? If it's fine to leave it at /basketball/hoops, do you think it would be beneficial to create an actual page for that path? We found that actually more people search for "basketball basket" than "basketball hoops" so maybe that would be a good page to try to make use of that term and explain maybe why people think "basket" instead of "hoop" and why we call ours "goals" or something. I tend to navigate pages by deleting path arguments and I hate when I land on a nonexistent path so I'm leaning toward changing the paths but just don't know if it's worth it at this point. Additionally, on one of the other sites, we have a domain that is the main keyword we want to rank for: swingsets.com The other company I mentioned then decided to put all of the product pages under: swingsets.com/swing-sets/{category}/{set-height}-{'swing-set'|'playset'|'swingsets'|'play-set'|etc...}/combo{#} So that comes out to look something like this: swingsets.com/swing-sets/outback/5ft-playsets/combo2 I've never liked that path setup. It looks stuffed to me, especially once they start using '5ft-swing-sets' and '6ft-play-set' on other product pages. It's inconsistent which is another issue I have since I tend to surf by path. Another issue with that setup is the final argument of combo{#} but there's nothing I can really do about that because they call the products out as combinations. The only actual product name is the "outback" part. I've been trying to come up with a better path setup for a long time now but again I'm concerned that I may just be wasting my time. The only thing I did do was make the height section consistently {height}-playsets. Is that good enough or should these paths remove /swing-sets from the beginning? The actual /swing-sets page is a good and valuable landing page but then I'm not sure if it remains valuable to keep it in the paths for the product pages afterward. Any insight into this dilemma would be appreciated. I've been stewing over this for a long time and my reasoning always becomes circular since I can see plenty of reasons for keeping them the way they are and simplifying them.
Web Design | | EscaladeSports0 -
Magento URL Structure
I'm about to migrate to Magento and wanted to ask about the optimal URL structure for the following page: Knowledge Centre |-Videos |-Customer Testimonials |-Customer X Would it be better to use: Domain/knowledge-centre/videos/customer-testimonials/customer-x or Domain/customer-x Thanks in advance for any replies.
Web Design | | ssoneil0 -
Google fails to pick out the correct URL of the story
Hi , I have a page with many news storeys on it. Google craws the page but it picks up a more general url even though I've embedded the direct URL within anchor tags around the headline . The snippet below got linked by Google to http://www.irishnews.com/ Any idea how i can get Google to pick-up http://www.irishnews.com/news.aspx?storyId=1180708 would be very welcome Peter Quinn: Family made scapegoats of financial crisis News Peter Quinn: Family made scapegoats of financial crisis THE Quinn family have been made scapegoats of the financial crisis surrounding the former Anglo Irish Bank, tycoon Sean Quinn's brother Peter claimed yesterday.Peter Quinn, a former president of the GAA, said hi read more»
Web Design | | Liammcmullen0 -
The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?
Hello all, We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó. We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure. Here is an example of our URL's EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded. EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone (When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters? When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently? My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure. NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue? Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, David from twago
Web Design | | wdziedzic0