NoIndex or Rel=Canonical Pagination
-
Hello,
I had a question about noindex and Rel=Canonical on category page pagination. On my site, the category page the meta="robots" has "Index,Follow" tags and the rel="canonical" is the main category page, but when a user sorts the page the meta="robots" changes to "NoIndex, Follow."
My question is should the sorted page be name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" /> since the rel="canonical" is pointing to the main page?? Or does it matter that it is NoIndex??
Any thoughts on this topic would be awesome. Thanks.
Main Category Page
https://www.site.com/category/
name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" />
rel="canonical" href="https://www.site.com/category/"/>Name Sorted Page
https://www.site.com/category/?dir=asc&order=name
name="robots" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" />
rel="canonical" href="https://www.site.com/category/"> -
Hi Chuck,
I would also look into categorizing your URL parameters in this case: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080550?hl=en as this is inovlving both sorting and categorizing the data on the page it's a good solution to tell Google more about the intent that you have on this page.
Martijn.
-
Hi Chuck,
It's strange to me that the "NOINDEX, FOLLOW" would be automatically added to these pages.
The canonical tag is correct so I wouldn't use "noindex" here - it's redundant.
John Mueller from Google recently explained why canonical and "noindex" shouldn't be used together: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-noindex-rel-canonical-confusion-26079.html
Cheers,
David
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
-
"Google-selected canonical different to user-declared" - issues
Hi Moz! We are having issues on a number of our international sites where Google is choosing our page 2 of a category as the canonical over page 1. Example; https://www.yoursclothing.de/kleider-grosse-groessen (Image attached). We currently use infinite loading, however when javascript is disabled we have a text link to page 2 which is done via a query string of '?filter=true&view=X&categoryid=X&page=2' Page 2 is blocked via robots.txt and has a canonical pointing at page 1. Due to Google selecting page 2 as the canonical, the page is no longer ranking. For the main keyphrase a subcategory page is ranking poorly. LqDO0qr
On-Page Optimization | | RemarkableAgency1 -
Ecommerce Canonical Question
Hi all, first question (eek) Could I pick the brains of fellow users around an issue we are having with canonical urls on a magento website. At the moment we do not have these enabled as it seems to break our indexing. Cut a long story short, we have thousands of products but haven't rewritten many of the descriptions from the manufacturers yet and so have noindexed all the product pages (freeing them as we go). The goal, for now, is to pull in traffic via the filtering options we have on the site The goal, for now, is to pull in traffic via the filtering options we have on the site. For example, if you go to Dresses, there then are several filtering options which would allow you to choose a colour, shape and material - if you wished to filter that precisely. These filtering options are all crawlable and so we would then have a page that google could index for, for example, Green Lace Maxi Dress. All good there, few people search for specific products and a lot search for types of products so we are covered. To get back to the issue at hand. If we enable the canonical option on our magento plugin it will stop us from being able to target these terms. Whereas the filtering option would create domain.com/dress/green/maxi/lace with the page title of Green Lace Maxi Dress, if we enable the canonical part of the seo plugin the canonical link which would be added to the page would be - instantly removing our ability to rank for longer tail dress related searches (we are not going to compete with the big players on the premium terms, yet!). There are alternative plugins we can buy for magento to add the correct tag, however, if every page's canonical just points back it itself like this, is there really much point spending nearly $1000 on the 4 licences we would need to cover our range of sites. Is it really necessary, in this case, that we have a canonical for the product filtering? Sorry for the long post, hope it made sense. Thanks for any assistance.
On-Page Optimization | | DSCarl0 -
Rel="canonical" Wordpress 2015 Best Practice
There are forum posts about how to insert rel="canonical" tags in Wordpress, but I've read about lots of changes in this space recently (updates to Yoast, for example). I'm having a problem with duplicate content on one of my sites, and it seems to be coming from multiple indexes of the same pages. I'll have a blog post show up under the posts, then the archives, then the tags. So, my question is, in early 2015, what are the current best practices for adding rel="canonical" tags in Wordpress? Thanks! Tim
On-Page Optimization | | TimLlew0 -
Google rel hell
So apologies in advance for this question, but: Can someone explain whether as a site we should be using the "rel author" tag or the "rel publisher" tag? 1. We don't really need to distinguish between the people who write our content. 2. We definitely do need to establish ownership of our content, as unfortunately it has been widely copied. We are spending quite a bit of time filing DMCA notices. 3. Do we need to apply either tag to every page? Or does "del publisher" just need to be applied to the homepage to cover the rest of the site? 4. What looks better in the search results? - a person's face or a company logo? If prefer a face, but understand we need to promote our brand. Thanks P
On-Page Optimization | | dexm100 -
Rel canonical tag back to the same page the tag is on?
Very simple, Why would a website (and I have seen tons doing this) link the rel canonical tag back to the same page the tag is on? Example: somepage.htm has a canonical tag linking to somepage.htm I thought the idea of this tag was to tell google if 2 pages are similar, this page is the original, and it's this page which should be indexed and the page with the tag on should pass all PR to the original. Maybe im wrong and someone can help me out to understand this.
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper0 -
Would adding noindex help?
I had completely forgotten that I have about 20 pages of content on my site that is an exact duplicate of other sites (i.e. obtained from PLR site). I really do not want to delete these pages as they do get a lot of visitors (or did before last algo updates). These visitors are not from organic search but have navigated to the pages from within my site. Question is should I a) add noindex to these pages and then ask google to remove them from index or b) try to rewrite them Many Thanks Simon
On-Page Optimization | | spes1230 -
Implementing rel=canonical in a CMS
Hi Guys, We have an issue with duplicate content caused by dynamic URLs, so want to implement rel=canonical. However this isn't easy due to the way out CMS works. These were pulled from SEOMoz scan: http://www.transair.co.uk/pp+Aerobatics-Training+463
On-Page Optimization | | brightonseorob
http://www.transair.co.uk/pp+Aerobatics-Training+463?page=1&perpage=10&sales_group=NULL&filter_colour=&filter_size=&sortby=RELEV&inStock=NO&resfilter=
and are obviously the same page. As far as I can see I have two options. 1. To implement the canonical meta tag only on page 1. 2. To implement the canonical tag so that I add ?page=X so
http://www.transair.co.uk/pp+Aerobatics-Training+463
would be
http://www.transair.co.uk/pp+Aerobatics-Training+463?page=1 Will this work? Thanks Rob0 -
Follow up on "Canonical Tag Placement - Every Page?"
But if it is like Pete said, I don't understand why e.g. SEO Moz has a Canonical Tag on this Page http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps Which leads to the exact same page!? What is the benefit of doing so? Regards
On-Page Optimization | | Here4You0