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
-
How do I best optimize my on-page SEO for a magazine-style wordpress theme?
My Wordpress website is set up with a magazine style theme (Newspaper). Maybe that's the issue overall here. Questions: 1) Pages vs Categories vs Posts I currently have a category with a few dozen posts under it. The category page itself has a ~1000 word article on it. It paginates every 10 posts or so at the bottom, but most of the page is duplicate because it's only swapping out a few links. Should I instead make the "category" a page with the posts childed under it? What's the best way to go about that? 2) Canonical and Pagination I get errors about a ton of duplicate content for paginated categories and my author page (all posts are under the admin account, which has ~40 pages or so. Every page is just a list of posts and it bitches about duplicate Titles and Descriptions on every one of the paginated posts). Should I canonical these back to the root author? Same question regarding pagination for categories, assuming I'm not going to be switching them to Pages. 3) Home Page Links Right now my home page just shows a few links to the top posts of all time. After that, it shows the 5 newest posts. On the sidebar it lists a few random pages/posts. There are also a few "category listings" which just shows random posts relevant to that category. Do I want something more static/structured? The navbar does list most main content pages under their appropriate category, but the home page itself is pretty much dynamic.
Technical SEO | | searchspot0 -
Trailing Slashes and SEO
Hi, We're currently using a third party blog platform (Blog Engine) on our site and we have a trailing slash issue. I can add as many trailing slashes as I want to the blog's homepage URL, but they don't redirect and our dev guys say this cannot be done with Blog Engine. We're in the process of building our own blog but, in the meantime, I just wanted to know if this will cause an issue? Individual blog posts with trailing slashes are redirected, it's just the homepage where it can't be done. I haven't noticed any traffic going to a blog URL with trailing slashes, and I don't believe any URLs with trailing slashes are being indexed, so should this be OK? Cheers, Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
After I 301 redirect duplicate pages to my rel=canonical page, do I need to add any tags or code to the non canonical pages?
I have many duplicate pages. Some pages have 2-3 duplicates. Most of which have Uppercase and Lowercase paths (generated by Microsoft IIS). Does this implementation of 301 and rel=canonical suffice? Or is there more I could do to optimize the passing of duplicate page link juice to the canonical. THANK YOU!
Technical SEO | | PFTools0 -
What is the best way to find missing alt tags on my site (site wide - not page by page)?
I am looking to find all the missing alt tags on my site at once. I have a FF extension that use to do it page by page, but my site is huge and that will take forever. Thanks!!
Technical SEO | | franchisesolutions1 -
Where to put Schema On Page
What part of my page should I put Schema data? Header? Footer? Also All pages? or just home page?
Technical SEO | | bozzie3114 -
SEO MOZ report showing duplicate content pages with without ending /
Hello the SEOMOZ report is showing me I have a lot of duplicate content and then proceeds listing almost every page on my site as showing with a URL with an ending "/" and without. I checked my sitemap and only one version is there, the one with "/". I have a Wordpress site. Any recommendations ? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | dpaq20110 -
Page not Accesible for crawler in on-page report
Hi All, We started using SEOMoz this week and ran into an issue regarding the crawler access in the on-page report module. The attached screen shot shows that the HTTP status is 200 but SEOMoz still says that the page is not accessible for crawlers. What could this be? Page in question
Technical SEO | | TiasNimbas
http://www.tiasnimbas.edu/Executive_MBA/pgeId=307 Regards, Coen SEOMoz.png0