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.
Rel="self" and what to do with it?
-
Hey there Mozzers,
Another question about a forum issue I encountered.
When a forum thread has more than just one page as we all know the best course of action is to use
rel="next"
rel="prev" or rel="previous"
But my forum automatically creates another line in the header called
Rel="self"
What that does is simple.
If i have 3 pages
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3**instead of this **
On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1
On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2
On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3:
it creates this
On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1
So as you can see it creates a url by adding the ?page=1 and names it rel=self which actually gives back a duplicate page because now instead of just
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1
I also have the same page at
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1?page=1
Do i even need rel="self"? I thought that rel="next" and rel="prev" was enough?
Should I change that?
-
That is odd. I'm unfamiliar with that markup other than as an RSS emulation here: https://gist.github.com/jonathantneal/5096851 and used with RSS / Atom feeds: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287. Maybe your forum software is doing them in this way in order to provide users with the corresponding RSS feed when subscribing to the post. I'd look into the documentation for your forum software to try and get a better insight into why it's there. Cheers!
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
-
"Avoid Too Many Internal Links" when you have a mega menu
Using the on-page grader and whilst further investigating internal linking, I'm concerned that as the ecommerce website has a very link heavy mega menu the rule of 100 may be impeding on the contextual links we're creating. Clearly we don't want to no-follow our entire menu. Should we consider no-indexing the third-level- for example short sleeve shirts here... Clothing > Shirts > Short Sleeve Shirts What about other pages we're don't care to index anyway such as the 'login page' the 'cart' the search button? Any thoughts appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ant-Scarborough0 -
Are HTML Sitemaps Still Effective With "Noindex, Follow"?
A site we're working on has hundreds of thousands of inventory pages that are generally "orphaned" pages. To reach them, you need to do a lot of faceting on the search results page. They appear in our XML sitemaps as well, but I'd still consider these orphan pages. To assist with crawling and indexation, we'd like to create HTML sitemaps to link to these pages. Due to the nature (and categorization) of these products, this would mean we'll be creating thousands of individual HTML sitemap pages, which we're hesitant to put into the index. Would the sitemaps still be effective if we add a noindex, follow meta tag? Does this indicate lower quality content in some way, or will it make no difference in how search engines will handle the links therein?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mothner0 -
Dilemma about "images" folder in robots.txt
Hi, Hope you're doing well. I am sure, you guys must be aware that Google has updated their webmaster technical guidelines saying that users should allow access to their css files and java-scripts file if it's possible. Used to be that Google would render the web pages only text based. Now it claims that it can read the css and java-scripts. According to their own terms, not allowing access to the css files can result in sub-optimal rankings. "Disallowing crawling of Javascript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings."http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.htmlWe have allowed access to our CSS files. and Google bot, is seeing our webapges more like a normal user would do. (tested it in GWT)Anyhow, this is my dilemma. I am sure lot of other users might be facing the same situation. Like any other e commerce companies/websites.. we have lot of images. Used to be that our css files were inside our images folder, so I have allowed access to that. Here's the robots.txt --> http://www.modbargains.com/robots.txtRight now we are blocking images folder, as it is very huge, very heavy, and some of the images are very high res. The reason we are blocking that is because we feel that Google bot might spend almost all of its time trying to crawl that "images" folder only, that it might not have enough time to crawl other important pages. Not to mention, a very heavy server load on Google's and ours. we do have good high quality original pictures. We feel that we are losing potential rankings since we are blocking images. I was thinking to allow ONLY google-image bot, access to it. But I still feel that google might spend lot of time doing that. **I was wondering if Google makes a decision saying, hey let me spend 10 minutes for google image bot, and let me spend 20 minutes for google-mobile bot etc.. or something like that.. , or does it have separate "time spending" allocations for all of it's bot types. I want to unblock the images folder, for now only the google image bot, but at the same time, I fear that it might drastically hamper indexing of our important pages, as I mentioned before, because of having tons & tons of images, and Google spending enough time already just to crawl that folder.**Any advice? recommendations? suggestions? technical guidance? Plan of action? Pretty sure I answered my own question, but I need a confirmation from an Expert, if I am right, saying that allow only Google image access to my images folder. Sincerely,Shaleen Shah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modbargains1 -
What is the best way to optimize/setup a teaser "coming soon" page for a new product launch?
Within the context of a physical product launch what are some ideas around creating a /coming-soon page that "teases" the launch. Ideally I'd like to optimize a page around the product, but the client wants to try build consumer anticipation without giving too many details away. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GSI0 -
Using the Word "Free" in Metadata
Hi Forum! I've searched previous questions, and couldn't find anything related to this. I know the word "free" when used in email marketing can trigger spam filters. If I use the word "free" in my metadata (title tag, description, and keywords just for fun) will I be penalized in any way? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
Does rel=canonical fix duplicate page titles?
I implemented rel=canonical on our pages which helped a lot, but my latest Moz crawl is still showing lots of duplicate page titles (2,000+). There are other ways to get to this page (depending on what feature you clicked, it will have a different URL) but will have the same page title. Does having rel=canonical in place fix the duplicate page title problem, or do I need to change something else? I was under the impression that the canonical tag would address this by telling the crawler which URL was the URL and the crawler would only use that one for the page title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | askotzko0 -
How Rel=Prev & Rel=Next work for me?
I have implemented Rel=Prev & Rel=Next tag on my website. I would like to give example URL to know more about it. http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/market-umbrellas?limit=40&p=3 http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/market-umbrellas?limit=40&p=4 http://www.vistapatioumbrellas.com/market-umbrellas?limit=40&p=5 Right now, I have blocked paginated pages by Robots.txt by following query. Disallow: /*?p= I have removed disallow syntax from Robots.txt for paginated pages. But, I have confusion with duplicate page title. If you will check all 3 pages so you will find out duplicate page title across all pages. I know that, duplicate page title is harmful for SEO. Will Google crawl + index all paginated pages? If yes so which page will get maximum benefits in organic ranking? Is there any specific way which may help me to solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0