Set Canonical for Paginated Content
-
Hi Guys,
This is a follow up on this thread: http://moz.com/community/q/dynamic-url-parameters-woocommerce-create-404-errors#
I would like to know how I can set a canonical link in Wordpress/Woocommerce which points to "View All" on category pages on our webshop.
The categories on my website can be viewed as 24/48 or All products but because the quanity constantly changes viewing 24 or 48 products isn't always possible.To point Google in the right direction I want to let them know that "View All" is the best way to go.
I've read that Google's crawler tries to do this automatically but not sure if this is the case on on my website.Here is some more info on the issue: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en
Thanks for the help!Joost
-
Joost - that's correct! Yes, I assume woocommerce, since they are product pages.
-
Hi Dan,
Thanks for the explanation.
Ok so I block 24 and 48 for Google but users can still use them to navigate through the site.
I assume this is woocommerce related because Woocommerce creates the output for the productpages right?Thanks again!
Joost
-
Joost
I think you'll need to get a developer or someone involved to help execute, but here's the ideal scenerio:
- Add meta "noindex" tags to ?show_products=24 and 48
- Make your 'view all' URL ideally just /product-category/t-shirts/ - with no parameter - or if you have to, maybe /t-shirts/all/ - your goal here is to keep it consistent and NOT the same parameter as the other pages
- Then, whatever consistent URL you have for the 'all' - don't add "noindex" to that (keep it indexable).
- Wait for Google to remove 24/48 URLs from the index (you have to just check every week or two with site: searches)
- Once they are noindexed, block crawling with robots.txt with this line:
Disallow: /?show_products= <---but ONLY use that if you've changed your 'view all' URLs to something else! You ideally want a different URL structure for 'view all' vs. not view all to control crawling and indexation more easily.
-
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your reply.
For the category t-shirt I've got this:/product-category/t-shirts/?show_products=24 (24)
/product-category/t-shirts/?show_products=48 (48)
/product-category/t-shirts/?show_products=41 (when All selected)Let me know! And thanks again for your time! Really apreciate it!Joost
-
Hi Joost
Can you provide examples of how all your URLs are setup? What does the URL look like for view all, 24 items etc etc?
-
Wow Dan!
Thanks for looking in to this!
I assume you are totally right but have no idea how I should implement this strategy on my site. It just a plain wordpress install with woocommerce. I use Yoast (ofcourse) but never went in-depth with robot.txt.
How can I provide you with more info? Or better; myself
Thanks again,
Joost
-
Hi Joost
It would be better to just "noindex" anything except view all. Then once they are gone from the index, set a block in robots.txt so they can't be crawled anymore. That fixes the issue at the source, the canonical is more of a bandaid. So:
1. Add a meta "noindex" tag to everything except view all (I am not 100% sure how in your wordpress setup - there's no one way, it depends on your setup).
2. Monitor the indexation of these pages in Google and wait for them to be removed (you can check with just searching for the URL in the search bar).
3. Once they are all gone from the index, block crawlers from accessing them by adding a line to your robots.txt file blocking the 24/48 URLs - again, I don't know the exact code for your robots.txt because I am unsure of your URL setup, but a dev or someone can help - or feel free to write back with these details and I'll try to help further.
-
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for helping out. I've read a lot about the theory behind View All and why & when it's better to set canonicals on page 2 and 3 to View All.
But I can't seem to find any information how to implement the rel canonical in wordpress/woocommerce.I know that Google will try to sort it out by itself (if View All) is available but helping them with a canonical will solve a lot of 404 crawls on our site.
Any ideas?Joost
-
Hi Joost
Did you happen to take a look at SEO Guide to Google Webmaster Recommendations for Pagination? There are some great tips in there that can help you implement this.
Also, View-all in search results & 5 common mistakes with rel=canonical from Google also has some tips.
Hope these help a bit! Let me know if you have any questions or comments! 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
-
Rel=Canonical For Landing Pages
We have PPC landing pages that are also ranking in organic search. We've decided to create new landing pages that have been improved to rank better in natural search. The PPC team however wants to use their original landing pages so we are unable to 301 these pages to the new pages being created. We need to block the old PPC pages from search. Any idea if we can use rel=canonical? The difference between old PPC page and new landing page is much more content to support keyword targeting and provide value to users. Google says it's OK to use rel=canonical if pages are similar but not sure if this applies to us. The old PPC pages have 1 paragraph of content followed by featured products for sale. The new pages have 4-5 paragraphs of content and many more products for sale. The other option would be to add meta noindex to the old PPC landing pages. Curious as to what you guys think. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | SoulSurfer80 -
Duplicate Content Question
I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.
Technical SEO | | stevefidelity0 -
Why are some pages now duplicate content?
It is probably a silly question, but all of a sudden, the following pages of one of my clients are reported as Duplicate content. I cannot understand why. They weren't before... http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/mediterranea-halal
Technical SEO | | MarketingEnergy
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/gyros-halal
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/döner-halal
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/vegetariana
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/seizoen-pizza-estate
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/contadina
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/4-stagioni
http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/shoarma Thanks for any help in the right direction 🙂 | |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| | <colgroup><col style="mso-width-source: userset; mso-width-alt: 17225; width: 353pt;" width="471"></colgroup>
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/mediterranea-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/gyros-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/döner-halal |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/vegetariana |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/seizoen-pizza-estate |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/contadina |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/4-stagioni |
| http://www.ciaoitalia.nl/product/pizza-originale/shoarma |0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, I'm working on a site and I'm having some issues with its structure causing duplicate content. The first issue is that the search pages will show up as duplicates.
Technical SEO | | OOMDODigital
A search for new inventory may be new.aspx
The duplicate may be something like new.aspx=page1, or something like that and so on. The second issue is with inventory. When new inventory gets put into the stock of the store, a new page for that item will be populated with duplicate content. There appears to be no canonical source for that page. How can I fix both of these? Thanks!0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
My issue with duplicate content is this. There are two versions of my website showing up http://www.example.com/ http://example.com/ What are the best practices for fixing this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OOMDODigital0 -
Duplicate content in Magento
Hi all We got some serious issues with duplicate content on a Magento site that we are marketing. For example: http://www.citcop.se/varmepumpar-luft-luft/panasonic/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw http://www.citcop.se/panasonic/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw http://www.citcop.se/panasonic-nordic-ce9nke-5-0kw All of the above seem to work just fine as it is now but since they are excatly the same product they should ofcourse do a 301 redirect to the main page. Any ideas on how to sort this out in Magnto without having to resort to manual work in .htaccess? Have a great day Fredrik
Technical SEO | | Resultify0 -
Duplicate title-tags with pagination and canonical
Some time back we implemented the Google recommendation for pagination (the rel="next/prev"). GWMT now reports 17K pages with duplicate title-tags (we have about 1,1m products on our site and about 50m pages indexed in Google) As an example we have properties listed in various states and the category title would be "Properties for Sale in [state-name]". A paginated search page or browsing a category (see also http://searchengineland.com/implementing-pagination-attributes-correctly-for-google-114970) would then include the following: The title for each page is the same - so to avoid the duplicate title-tags issue, I would think one would have the following options: Ignore what Google says Change the canonical to http://www.site.com/property/state.html (which would then only show the first XX results) Append a page number to the title "Properties for Sale in [state-name] | Page XX" Have all paginated pages use noindex,follow - this would then result in no category page being indexed Would you have the canonical point to the individual paginated page or the base page?
Technical SEO | | MagicDude4Eva2 -
Include pagination in sitemap.xml?
Curious on peoples thoughts around this. Since restructuring our site we have seen a massive uplift in pages indexed and organic traffic with our pagination. But we haven't yet included a sitemap.xml. It's an ancient site that never had one. Given that Google seems to be loving us right now, do we even need a sitemap.xml - aside from the analytical benefis in WM Tools? Would you include pagination URL's (don't worry, we have no duplicate content) in the sitemap.xml? Cheers.
Technical SEO | | sichristie0