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  4. Rel="self" and what to do with it?

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Rel="self" and what to do with it?

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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  • Angelos_Savvaidis
    Angelos_Savvaidis last edited by Feb 13, 2015, 10:20 PM

    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?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • RyanPurkey
      RyanPurkey last edited by Feb 14, 2015, 9:34 PM Feb 14, 2015, 9:34 PM

      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!

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