Product page Canonicalization best practice

[IceIcebaby]

I'm getting duplicate content errors in GWT for product list pages that look like this:

-www.example.com/category-page/product
-www.example.com/category-page/product/?p=2

The "p=2" example already has a rel=canonical in place, " Shouldn't the non-canonical pages be using the canonical attribute for the first page rather than the additional product pages?

Thanks!

[danatanseo]

Awesome Reed. Thanks for the hat-tip on Twitter too. I appreciate that. Cheers!

[IceIcebaby]

Thanks Dana, checked out the blog and video...pinned to my RSS feed.

[danatanseo]

Hi Reed,

I agree with the first part of Marty's answer above, but I disagree with both Marty and Arie regarding what the proper canonical tag should be for the pages in your paginated series. It just so happens that I was studying this very subject last week and Adam Audette released an excellent post on the subject on the RKG blog.

According to Adam, the canonical tags on the pages in your series should be self-referencing. If they aren't, you run the risk of Googlebot thinking that all the content (products, items...if it's an eCommerce site) is just the same as the content on page one of the series, which of course, it isn't.

Here's a link to his most excellent blog post on the subject, which also contains some links to other talks and posts he has given regarding pagination. Pagination is one of his main authority areas:

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/video-avoid-pagination-gotchas/03042014/

Hope this helps!

Dana

[Mr.bfz]

Yes, the canonical should point to the original page. If you have 2 similar pages the canonical of the second page should point to the first page.

I agree with Martin that the rel=next and rel=next is a good solution for pagination as well.

Good luck

[mosquitohawk]

Your best way of handling that is to canonicalize all pages to a "View All" page for the search engine and use rel="prev" and rel="next" for your "Next" and "Previous" links respectively.

That's the best way to handle pagination if you're going to use canonicals.  To answer your question directly though, the paginated pages should not canonical themselves.

Another solution would be to noindex,follow pages 2 - n.

Hope that helps!