Paging. is it better to use noindex, follow

[donthe]

Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category

or just let Google index these pages

Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link

So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-))  My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site.

Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page

Thanks!

[khi5]

Hi Theo, This is an old post you commented on, but I wanted to expand on the question and ask your thoughts: I have a real estate website where I show MLS listings (properties for sale shared by Realtors) which means these MLS listings also exit on 100+ other real estate sites. For my various MLS result pages I use rel=prev / next for paginated pages. Now, here is the question: should I also ad a "no index, follow" on these paginated pages? According to a Google blog post it said no need to use when using rel=prev / next. However, in my case these pages are very similar to other pages around the web and not original content. Yes, I know I could make more unique by adding content, but that is not what my users want. I need a simple clean look with minimal words. So, if I have a result page with 10 pages, would no index follow 9 of those pages make sense to reduce the duplicate content on my website? Or, is issue that my result page will look "thin" compared to competitors and that will impact my ranking negatively?

[john4math]

Google just announced some tags to help support pagination better.  They say if you have a view all option that doesn't take too long to load, searchers generally prefer that, so you can rel=canonical to that page.  However, if you don't have a view all page, then you can put these nifty rel="next" and rel="prev" tags in to let Google know your page has pagination, and where the next and previous pages are.

View all: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

next/prev: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

[Theo-NL]

I was talking about the same concept you're describing when I mentioned category listings. The next / previous and related items sound exactly like the things that I would recommend to get links to the page > 1 items! Lastly, yes the canonical URL should be the page we're actually viewing and not always page 1.

[donthe]

What do you mean by category listings? I'm talking about category pages where each item in the category is listed.

I do link from product or item pages to each other using next, previous and related items.

Also I'm pretty sure about this but just asking, rel=canonical for page 2,3 should be that page and not page 1 ?

[Theo-NL]

You're welcome! It is a link from one page of your website to another, thus an internal link. I don't see how noindex,follow would change that. Yes, they will receive link juice. Because of the follow in the robots tag the pages (even though they aren't indexed) still pass link juice. Like I said in my original post, it is best to have other pages (such as category listings for example) link to these items as welll though.

[donthe]

Thanks for the answer.

Does a link from a page with noindex,follow count as an internal link? Will the items on page 2 receive any link juice, if their only internal link is from a noindexed page?

What do you think?

[Theo-NL]

From what I've read on the internet, it is best to "noindex,follow" all pages >1. This issue had bugged me for quite some time as well, and I've struggled to find good resources explaining why their solution was the best. Now that I've actually given the subject some thought, and finally managed to read some quality material on the matter, it all makes sense.

It's basically a checklist. Do you want search engines to

• index your paginated result pages: yes / no

• reach the items that are listed in your paginated result pages: yes / no

In most cases you don't want your paginated result pages to be indexed. With our without Panda, visitors get little value from actually viewing 'page 7' in your result pages. That actual page provides little or no value to those visitors. However, you DO want those items listed on these paginated pages to be crawled, especially when you don't have any other pages linking to them (which you should by the way). This boils down to:

• Don't nofollow your paginated links (because you want search engine spiders to reach them)

• Put "noindex,follow" in the meta robots tag for all pages >1 (thus page 2 and greater) so the engines will no index these paginated results, but will crawl on to the pages that are behind the listings

Good luck!