Job/Blog Pages and rel=canonical
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Hi,
I know there are several questions and articles concerning the rel=canonical on SEOmoz, but I didn't find the answer I was looking for...
We have some job pages, URLs are: /jobs and then jobs/2, jobs/3 etc..
Our blog pages follow the same: /blog, /blog2, /blog/3...
Our CMS is self-produced, and every job/blog-page has the same title tag. According to SEOmoz (and the Webmaster Tools), we have a lots of duplicate title tags because of this problem.
If we put the rel=canonical on each page's source code, the title tag problem will be solved for google, right? Because they will just display the /job and /blog main page. That would be great because we dont want 40 blog pages in the index.
My concern (a stupid question, but I am not sure): if we put the rel=canonical on the pages, does google crawl them and index our job links? We want to keep our rankings for our job offers on pages 2-xxx.
More simple: will we find our job offers on jobs/2, jobs/3... in google, if these pages have the rel=canonical on them?
AND ONE MORE: does the SEOmoz bot also follow the rel=canonical and then reduce the number of duplicate title-tags in the campaigns???
Thanx........
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Hi,
First off, even with a canonical, I'd suggest you have a unique title tag if for no other reason than users. Changing the title, even slightly, can help. For my clients, I usually suggest something simple like adding ", Page #2" after the main title. Google may or may not index the page, but that way if a user bookmarks the page (or shares it), the title is different.
Second, you need more than a canonical link to correct this problem. You are dealing with a sequence, which means you need to use rel prev/next as well as the canonical. (For example: on page 2 of your jobs, the canonical would be /jobs/2, the rel prev would be /jobs, and rel next would be /jobs/3.) Treating these pages like a sequence will help explain this group of pages more effectively. And, that means...
Finally, the rel prev/next would also help those second, third, fourth, etc. pages from falling out of Google's index and allow Google to find those jobs listed on those subsequent pages. Instead of telling Google that the subsequent pages are duplications (which is what you are saying by having a canonical referencing the main page on each subsequent page), you instead would be saying that these pages are grouped together as a sequence making it acceptable for Google to crawl through those pages.
I hope that helps. Also, I'm not sure how SEOmoz handles the canonical in regards to duplicate content.
Thanks.
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