ECommerce site - Duplicate pages problem.

[SarahCollins]

We have an eCommerce site with multiple products being displayed on a number of pages.

We use rel="next" and rel="prev" and have a display ALL which I understand Google should automatically be able to find.

1. Should we also being using a Canonical tag as well to tell google to give authority to the first page or the All Pages. Or was the use of the next and prev rel tags that we currently do adequate.

2. We currently display 20 products per page, we were thinking of increasing this to make fewer pages but they would be better as this which would make some later product pages redundant . If we add 301 redirects on the redundant pages, does anyone know of the sort of impact this might cause to traffic and seo ?.

General thoughts if anyone has similar problems welcome

[Delete2012]

I think the best solution to get something properly done on your website, if you're displaying a page with 20 products (by default) and it has a complicated extension to see the next one ( domain.com/?abc=123etc#321 ) you have a significant problem that you should be concerned about more - whether it's domain.com/category/page/1/ and page/2/.

In theory, page/1/ and page/2/ (blog style) contain the same content as the home page (/1/ or /). Some practices are noindex,follow for any page [2-∞). You should definitely consider rel=canonical across the site though. It's essential. As well as rel="next" rel="prev".

[Dr-Pete]

(1) DON'T canonical to the first page of results - Google definitely has issues with that. If you've got rel=prev/next in place, then I wouldn't canonical to "View All", either. They're kind of competing signals. You can use rel=prev/next with rel=canonical, but it's a bit complicated. Basically, it's for situations where you have pagination AND some other parameter, like a sort.

(2) If you increase it, just make sure it doesn't negatively impact users or load-times (might be worth A/B testing, honestly). Are you saying that you might end up with a URL like "?page=7" which basically doesn't exist because now you'll have less pages? I think you might be safer just letting that 404 and have Google recrawl the new structure. The odds of having any links to Page 7 of search results (inbound links, that is) are very low, and just letting those pages die off may be safer.

[SarahCollins]

Hi ,

Many Thanks for your reply,

We do have pagination and sorts like listing products a-z , z-a , price low to high and high to low etc which all generate different urls but we have put in the robot.txt file for google not to spider them. See below .

Also from looking at WMT is says it has blocked886,996 url's in the past 90 days. Our site has approx 54,000 indexed pages.

Disallow: */sort_by:Product.price%20ASC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.price%20DESC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.title%20ASC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.title%20DESC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.distance%20ASC
Disallow: */sort_by:Product.distance%20DESC
Disallow: */stealth:on

Are you suggesting we do the Canonical the sorts aas well for saftey incase we have missed anything ?

Sarah

[SarahCollins]

Hi ,

In Answer to your point on to Question 2 , Currently the maximum number of pages we have is 4 pages plus a View All for a few of our products but most products are split on 2 pages plus a view all.

For the largest product example we have 83 products broken down as Page 1 to 4 has 20 products , page5 has 3 and View all - 83 products. rel Prev and rel Next are on the pages and View all has Nothing on it  (Is that okay).  The title tags are duplicated on the numerous pages , so I was going to add in page 2, 3, 4 etc to sort that.

I was going to increase the number of products per page to 30 , which would in effect put me down to 3 pages plus View all  but more importantly , I thought I would also get stronger link value and less dilution hence better SEO .

The  pages don't rank partially well at all well but on google speed test, I think we score 85/100 anyway , so from a speed point of view, it should'nt be a problem. Was just worried, that big changes like this could have a dramatic effect .

The url incase your interested is http://www.bestathire.co.uk/rent/Scaffold_towers/266

Many thanks

Very much appreciated.

Sarah.

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, pagination + sorts gets ugly fast. Technically, the rel=prev/next tag should contain the sort parameter AND then you should canonical to the main pagination page. So, for example if you had a page like:

www.example.com/search.php?page=2&sort=asc

You should have tags like:

• Rel=Prev: http://www.example.com/search.php?page=1&sort=asc
• Rel=Next: http://www.example.com/search.php?page=3&sort=asc
• Canonical: http://www.example.com/search.php?page=2

In practice, it's incredibly hard to implement. So, you could do a couple of things:

(1) Block the sort_by parameter with Google Webmaster Tools parameter handling

(2) Use META NOINDEX, FOLLOW on all pages 2+ of search and sort URLs

I don't find Robots.txt works that well, in practice, and 800K blocked URLs can make Google jump. I'm actually confused by how Google is crawling the sorts at all (since they're form-driven). It looks like you put the sorts in your pagination links. Would it be possible to store any sorts in a cookie or session variable and not add those to links?

Given your current situation, and that Google has indexed thousands of sort URLs (from what I can see), I think the Google Webmaster Tools approach might be the safest. This is a complex problem, though, and you may need to consult someone.

[SarahCollins]

Hi Peter,

Many thanks for your answer. Very comprehensive and much appreciated There's certainly some good suggestions here.

Just quickly you mention about putting a NOINDEX FOLLOW on every page from 2 or 3 onwards.I take it , that's because later pages don't rank to well ?.

Is that the suggestion so the idea behind it that the link juice is being diluted to much. By Keeping only the first 2 pages say indexed etc, I would stand a better chance of ranking higher.

I will pass your suggestions on to my developer and see what we can come up from it.  Will monitor and report back , hopefully with a sorted solutioin.

Once again , many thanks for sound advice.

Sarah.

[Dr-Pete]

Essentially yes - pages 2+ of search just look "thin" to Google. They tend to have similar title tags, META descriptions, etc., and Google honestly isn't all that fond of indexing search pages in the first place (they don't want their search to land on your search). Those 2+ pages also don't tend to attract links or make a lot of sense for someone landing on them. By using META NOINDEX,FOLLOW, Google can crawl those searches to deeper pages, but the actually search pages don't dilute your overall site and search index.

Google's preferred method (or so they say) in 2012 is rel=prev/next, but I find that implementation can be much trickier than META NOINDEX. It's a difficult topic, and I honestly find that the ideal approach varies wildly from site to site. It's important to plan well, implement careful, and measure the results.

[SarahCollins]

Many thanks , you have been most helpful.

Yes, I see your point. I think we will have a look at implementing this on a couple of categories where we can monitor traffic and rankings . Then if it looks good, then will roll it out to the rest of the site.

Thank you.

Sarah