Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. Digital Marketing
    3. Web Design
    4. Have Your Thoughts Changed Regarding Canonical Tag Best Practice for Pagination? - Google Ignoring rel= Next/Prev Tagging

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Have Your Thoughts Changed Regarding Canonical Tag Best Practice for Pagination? - Google Ignoring rel= Next/Prev Tagging

    Web Design
    4
    4
    1281
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Joe_Stoffel
      Joe_Stoffel last edited by

      Hi there,

      We have a good-sized eCommerce client that is gearing up for a relaunch. At this point, the staging site follows the previous best practice for pagination (self-referencing canonical tags on each page; rel=next & prev tags referencing the last and next page within the category).

      Knowing that Google does not support rel=next/prev tags, does that change your thoughts for how to set up canonical tags within a paginated product category? We have some categories that have 500-600 products so creating and canonicalizing to a 'view all' page is not ideal for us. That leaves us with the following options (feel it is worth noting that we are leaving rel=next / prev tags in place):

      1. Leave canonical tags as-is, page 2 of the product category will have a canonical tag referencing ?page=2 URL
      2. Reference Page 1 of product category on all pages within the category series, page 2 of product category would have canonical tag referencing page 1 (/category/) - this is admittedly what I am leaning toward.

      Any and all thoughts are appreciated! If this were in relation to an existing website that is not experiencing indexing issues, I wouldn't worry about these. Given we are launching a new site, now is the time to make such a change.

      Thank you!

      Joe

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • Promoverity
        Promoverity last edited by

        An old question, but thought I'd weigh in with to report that Google seems to be ignoring self-referring pagination canonicals on a news site that I'm working on.

        Pages such as /news/page/36/ have themselves as declared canonicals, but Search Console reports that Google is selecting the base page /news/ as the canonical instead.

        Would be interested to know if anyone else is seeing that.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Mat_C
          Mat_C Subscriber last edited by

          Hi,

          I'm also very interested in what the new best approach for pagination would be.

          In a lot of webshops, option 2 is used. However, in this article the possible negative outcome of this option is described (search the article for 'Canonicalize to the first page'). In my opinion, this is particularly true for paginated blog articles, and less so for paginated results of products per category in webshops. I think the root page is the one you want to rank in the end.

          What you certainly don't want, is create duplicate content. Yes, your products (and of course their links to the product pages) are different for each page. And yes, there will be also more internal links pointing to the root category page, and not to the second or third results page. But if you invested time in writing content for your category, and invested time in all the other on page optimizations, these will be the same across all your result pages.

          So in the end, we leave it to Google and hope that they do recognize your pagination. Is this the best option? Maybe, maybe not. Anyway, we didn't know that they didn't use rel=next/prev for several years, and mostly it worked fine.

          So I think in the end EffectDigital is right, just do nothing. If you see problems, I would try option 2, using your first results page as canonical.

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

            The only thing it changes IMO is delete rel=prev / next tags to save on code bloat. Other than that, nothing changes in my opinion. It's still best to allow Google to rank paginated URLs if Google chooses to do so - as it usually happens for a reason!

            I might lift the self referencing canonicals, maybe. Just leave them without directives of any kind, and force Google to determine what to do with them via URL structure ('?p=', '/page/', '?page=' etc). If they're so confident they don't need these tags now, maybe using any directives at all is just creating polluting signals that will unnecessarily interfere

            In the end I think I'd just strip it all off and monitor it, see what happened

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • 1 / 1
            • First post
              Last post

            Got a burning SEO question?

            Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


            Start my free trial


            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.

            • See all categories

            Related Questions

            • PabloCulebras

              Can I safely asume that links between subsites on a subdirectories based multisite will be treated as internal links within a single site by Google?

              I am building a multisite network based in subdirectories (of the mainsite.com/site1 kind)  where the main site is like a company site, and subsites are focused on brands or projects of that company. There will be links back and forth from the main site and the subsites, as if subsites were just categories or pages within the main site (they are hosted in subfolders of the main domain, after all). Now, Google's John Mueller has said: <<as far="" as="" their="" url="" structure="" is concerned,="" subdirectories="" are="" no="" different="" from="" pages="" and="" subpages="" on="" your="" main="" site.="" google="" will="" do="" its="" best="" to="" identify="" where="" sites="" separate="" using="" but="" the="" is="" same="" for="" a="" single="" site,="" you="" should="" assume="" that="" seo="" purposes,="" network="" be="" treated="" one="">></as> This sounds fine to me, except for the part "Google will do its best to identify where sites are separate", because then, if Google establishes that my multisite structure is actually a collection of different sites, links between subsites and mainsite would be considered backlinks between my own sites, which could be therefore considered a link wheel, that is, a kind of linking structure Google doesn't like. How can I make sure that Google understand my multisite as a unique site? P.S. - The reason I chose this multisite structure, instead of hosting brands in categories of the main site, is that if I use the subdirectories based multisite feature I will be able to map a TLD domain to any of my brands (subsites) whenever I'd choose to give that brand a more distinct profile, as if it really was a different website.

              Web Design | | PabloCulebras
              0
            • Stew222

              Is The HREF Link "Title" Tag Needed on Mobile Websites?

              Hello To Those Who Are Wiser Than I, I am wondering if the href link "title" tag is needed, or serves any purpose, on mobile websites?  Also, does it effect SEO in any way? I ask because generally the href link title tag provides more information to the user when they scroll their mouse over the link - but this action does not happen on mobile!  Users have no mouse and thus no extra information would be displayed. I'm really wondering if it still matters for SEO purposes on mobile though. -The UnEnlightened

              Web Design | | Stew222
              0
            • johncurlee

              Best practice for multilanguage website ( PHP feature based on Browser or Geolocalisation)

              Hi Moz Experts I would like to know what does it the best practice for multilanguage website for the default language ? There are several PHP features to help users to get the right language when they come from SEO and direct; present the default language by browser language, by gelolocalisation, etc. However, which one is the most appropriate for Quebec company that try to get outside Canada ? PRO and CONS. Thank you in advance.

              Web Design | | johncurlee
              0
            • JaanMSonberg

              SEO strategy for UK / US websites

              Hi, We currently have a UK-focused site on www.palmatin.com ; We're now targeting the North American market as well, but the contents of the site need to be different from UK. One option was to create another domain for the NA market but I assume it would be easier to rank with palmatin.com though. What would you suggest to do, if a company is targeting two different countries in the same language? thanks, jaan

              Web Design | | JaanMSonberg
              0
            • DRSearchEngOpt

              Best way to indicate multiple Lang/Locales for a site in the sitemap

              So here is a question that may be obvious but wondering if there is some nuance here that I may be missing. Question:  Consider an ecommerce site that has multiple sites around the world but are all variations of the same thing just in different languages.  Now lets say some of these exist on just a normal .com page while others exist on different ccTLD's.  When you build out the XML Sitemap for these sites, especially the ones on the other ccTLD's, we want to ensure that using <loc>http://www.example.co.uk/en_GB/"</loc> <xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
              hreflang="en-AU"
              href="http://www.example.com.AU/en_AU/"
              />
              <xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
              hreflang="en-NZ"
              href="http://www.example.co.NZ/en_NZ/"
              /> Would be the correct way of doing this.  I know I have to change this for each different ccTLD but it just looks weird when you start putting about 10-15 different language locale variations as alternate links.  I guess I am just looking for a bit of re-affirmation I am doing this right.</xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br> Thanks!

              Web Design | | DRSearchEngOpt
              0
            • NoisyLittleMonkey

              Is it bad to have /index.php at the end of a uri?

              Is it bad for SEO if traffic is directed to "http://www.example.com/someuri/index.php" instead of "http://www.example.com/someuri/" and would it be works setting up a redirect rule at htaccess level?

              Web Design | | NoisyLittleMonkey
              1
            • DownPour

              Infinite Scrolling vs. Pagination on an eCommerce Site

              My company is looking at replacing our ecommerce site's paginated browsing with a Javascript infinite scroll function for when customers view internal search results--and possibly when they browse product categories also. Because our internal linking structure isn't very robust, I'm concerned that removing the pagination will make it harder to get the individual product pages to rank in the SERPs. We have over 5,000 products, and most of them are internally linked to from the browsing results pages in the category structure: e.g. Blue Widgets, Widgets Under $250, etc. I'm not too worried about removing pagination from the internal search results pages, but I'm concerned that doing the same for these category pages will result in de-linking the thousands of product pages that show up later in the browsing results and therefore won't be crawlable as internal links by the Googlebot. Does anyone have any ideas on what to do here? I'm already arguing against the infinite scroll, but we're a fairly design-driven company and any ammunition or alternatives would really help. For example, would serving a different page to the Googlebot in this case be a dangerous form of cloaking? (If the only difference is the presence of the pagination links.) Or is there any way to make rel=next and rel=prev tags work with infinite scrolling?

              Web Design | | DownPour
              0
            • JoshTurner

              Changing from Squarespace to Wordpress - Will I Lose My Rankings?

              I have a friend who has a squarespace site that is giving him lots of trouble.  For one, even though it is supposed to redirect to GreenSpaceConstruct.com...Bing and Yahoo don't seem to recognize this domain.  Instead, they show greenlightconstruct.squarespace.com in the serp's.  Oddly, Google shows the site as GreenSpaceConstruct.com. The site is ranking well for some terms.  I'm afraid that converting to wordpress will hurt his rankings in the short term.  If bing and yahoo are crawling this squarespace domain, and he moves it...is there a way not to just completely lose the rankings? Thanks for any thoughts.  Much appreciated! Josh

              Web Design | | JoshTurner
              0

            Get started with Moz Pro!

            Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

            Start my free trial
            Products
            • Moz Pro
            • Moz Local
            • Moz API
            • Moz Data
            • STAT
            • Product Updates
            Moz Solutions
            • SMB Solutions
            • Agency Solutions
            • Enterprise Solutions
            Free SEO Tools
            • Domain Authority Checker
            • Link Explorer
            • Keyword Explorer
            • Competitive Research
            • Brand Authority Checker
            • Local Citation Checker
            • MozBar Extension
            • MozCast
            Resources
            • Blog
            • SEO Learning Center
            • Help Hub
            • Beginner's Guide to SEO
            • How-to Guides
            • Moz Academy
            • API Docs
            About Moz
            • About
            • Team
            • Careers
            • Contact
            Why Moz
            • Case Studies
            • Testimonials
            Get Involved
            • Become an Affiliate
            • MozCon
            • Webinars
            • Practical Marketer Series
            • MozPod
            Connect with us

            Contact the Help team

            Join our newsletter
            Moz logo
            © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
            • Accessibility
            • Terms of Use
            • Privacy

            Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.