On-Page SEO of the SEOmoz Blog Section
-
Hey Everyone
My brain isn't working (only had 1 cup of coffee so far - #2 on it's way) this morning and I could use some help.
We're creating a blog on a site for a client of ours and I've been looking at the SEOmoz blog for best practices when it comes to the implementation of pagination, canonical tags and noindex.
My questions:
- There is no use of the canonical tag on the main blog page or any of the paginated pages but it is being used on blog post pages. Why not use it on the main blog pages as well? I'm assuming because the blog pages are always changing with different content there is not much point?
- Paginated pages in the category sections i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1?page=2 are noindexed but paginated pages in the main blog section i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog?page=2 are not. Is this because of a duplicate content concern since the posts in the category sections are in the main blog section as well? If that's the case, why wouldn't the main category page i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1 be noindexed as well?
- What's the reason for noindexing the "Show # Posts" pages i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog?show=5 ? I'm assuming another concern of duplicate content?
Any insights into these questions would be greatly appreciated and would help with the implementation of our clients blog.
Thanks,
Ken
-
Hey Ruth!
Thanks so much for the response and answers to my questions. You helped solidify what I was already thinking. I was wondering why the rel=next and rel=prev tags weren't being used. I thought for sure SEOmoz would be on the forefront of new on-page SEO techniques. Totally get the whole "do as we say, not as we do" mantra though.
One question though: You said you noindex category pages' pagination because of duplicate content; that the items also exist in the main blog's pagination as well. But, don't the items on the main category landing pages exist in the main blog as well? So wouldn't that be duplicate content as well?
BTW - Congrats on the new role as the Lead SEO, must be exciting!
Thanks,
Ken
-
Hi Ken,
Thanks for looking to our blog as an example - I wish we could be the perfect example of on-page SEO that we want to be, but like a lot of big, oldish websites we've got a lot of room for improvement. Some of the things you've called out are on my wish list to fix. In general when it comes to SEOmoz.org, a "do as we say, not as we do" attitude can be useful. I'll try to answer your questions with "what we should be doing" instead of "what we are doing."
- The only page within the blog that we might wish to self-canonical (as we do on individual post pages) would be www.seomoz.org/blog, which we probably should be doing. I don't think there's as much point in self-canonicaling subsequent pagination, since as you say the blog pages are always changing. In general we do like to put a canonical tag on each page canonicaling it back to itself, so query parameters and other referring data don't cause problems with duplicate URLs/content.
- Rather than noindexing paginated pages in the main blog, I would like to see us start using rel=prev and rel=next. You can learn more about that here.http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html. The reason that we noindex category pages' pagination is that it becomes duplicate content, since all of those items are also appearing in the main blog's pagination as well. We do want the main category pages to be indexed because we want people searching on those specific categories to be able to find them; we've had a lot of discussion in the MozPlex lately about how to give those pages some relevant unique content and make them more of a useful destination for people searching on specific topics. You may see some changes to these, although right now it's a bit low on my list of things to update.
- We noindex the "show # of pages" pages because of duplicate content concerns, and I suggest you do the same.
Thanks for your question, and please let me know if you have any more.
-
I don't work for SEOmoz, so I can't say exactly why they do what they do, but as far as I know the canonical tag would be used on the index page of their site. As this is where it would be need to let google know if it's www.seomoz.com or seomoz.com.
As far as the pagination it's sounds like you answered that already, trying to stop duplicate content from being indexed. The same with noindexing the show post pages.
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
-
Question on Pagination - /blog/ vs /blog/?page=1
Question on Pagination Because we could have /blog/ or /blog/?page=1 as page one would this be the correct way to markup the difference between these two URL? The first page of a sequence could start with either one of these URLs. Clarity around what to do on this first page would be helpful. Example… Would this be the correct way to do this as these two URLs would have the exact content? Internal links would likely link to /blog/ so signal could be muddy. URL: https://www.somedomain.com/blog/
Technical SEO | | jorgensoncompanies
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.somedomain.com/blog/?page=1"> URL: https://www.somedomain.com/blog/?page=1
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.somedomain.com/blog/?page=1"> Google is now saying to just use the canonical to the correct paginated URL with page number. You can read that here:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/ecommerce/pagination-and-incremental-page-loading But they do not clarify what to do on /blog/?page=1 vs /blog/ as they are the exact same thing. Thanks for your help.0 -
Redesigned and Migrated Website - Lost Almost All Organic Traffic - Mobile Pages Indexing over Normal Pages
We recently redesigned and migrated our site from www.jmacsupply.com to https://www.jmac.com It has been over 2 weeks since implementing 301 redirects, and we have lost over 90% of our organic traffic. Google seems to be indexing the mobile versions of our pages over our website pages. We hired a designer to redesign the site, and we are confident the code is doing something that is harmful for ranking our website. F or Example: If you google "KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38" You should see our mobile page ranking: http://www.jmac.com/mobile/Product.aspx?ProductCode=KEEDEX-K-DS-FLX38 but the page that we want ranked (and we think should be, is https://www.jmac.com/Keedex_K_DS_FLX38_p/keedex-k-ds-flx38.htm) That second page isn't even indexed. (When you search for: "site:jmac.com Keedex K-DS-FLX38") We have implemented rel canonical, and rel alternate both ways. What are we doing wrong??? Thank you in advance for any help - it is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | jmaccom0 -
Should I noindex my blog's tag, category, and author pages
Hi there, Is it a good idea to no index tag, category, and author pages on blogs? The tag pages sometimes have duplicate content. And the category and author pages aren't really optimized for any search term. Just curious what others think. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Rignite0 -
SSl and SEO
Does the type of SSL used on a site have any significance to trust and seo ranking?
Technical SEO | | unikey0 -
I am using SEOmoz pro software and my blog tags are bringing up 404 errors.
After checking they do bring back a 404 page, so i am wondering what to do. Do i remove all the blog tags? We use a Drupal cms system.
Technical SEO | | AITLtd0 -
Page MozRank and MozTrust 0 for Home Page, Makes No Sense?
Hey Mozzers! I'm a bit confused by a site that is showing a 0 for home page MozRank and MozTrust, while its subdomain and root domain metrics look decent (relatively). I am posting images of the page metrics and subdomain metrics to show the disparity: http://i.imgur.com/3i0jq.png http://i.imgur.com/ydfme.png Is it normal to see this type of disparity? The home page has very little inbound links, but the big goose egg has me wondering if there is something else going on. Has anyone else experienced this? Or, does anyone have speculation as to why a home page would have a 0 MozRank while the subdomain metrics look much better? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ClarityVentures0 -
Syndicating With Blogs
Hey all, The idea is that whenever i post a new article on my blog on my "money site" would it be OK to syndicate the same article to all of my other blogs like wordpress, tumblr etc? So for example the exact same content that is on my website will be on myblog.wordpress.com and myblog.tumblr.com but with a URL at the bottom pointing to the original source. (the money site article URL) Are there any foreseeable problems with this? The objective being having the content distributed across the web as much as possible I apologise if this has been asked before, i could not find the answer. Regards Greg
Technical SEO | | AndreVanKets0