Pagination solution

[Jacobe]

I'm using pagination following Google's guidelines to resolve duplication on pages such as:

1. www.domain.be/product-overview/
2. www.domain.be/product-overview/2/

Is it sufficient to apply rel="prev" and rel="next" to search results navigation or is it wise to apply a canonical tag on www.domain.be/product-overview/2/ to www.domain.be/product-overview/?

Many thanks for your insights!

[Matthew_Edgar]

Hi Jacob,

You do want to include a canonical on page 2 but you want the canonical to reference page 2. This confused me at first but the reason is that you want Google to see page 2 as something separate from page 1, but part of the same series as page 1, page 3, etc. So, for that page 2, your should have:

I look at it this way: the canonical says, page 2 is a page that Google can index but the prev/next links reminds Google that this page doesn't stand alone.

Here is more from Google. See the "A few points to mention:" section.

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

I hope that helps. Thanks,
Matthew

[THB]

Not all web crawlers honour the rel="prev" and rel="next" attributes, but I always use them because they cannot harm you and are especially helpful for crawlers that do take them into consideration.

I made the mistake, ages ago, of placing the canonical tag on my pagination pages that pointed to the first page.  I didn't have a firm grasp of the canonical tag at that time, and i paid the price for it.  Now I find that the canonical tag is grossly over/misused as you don't even need to place it on any of the pagination pages.  Google knows what page it's on and will usually just disregard the canonical tag.  It will only take it into consideration if the URL and canonical tag don't match.

Make sure to change up your title/meta tags to accommodate the various pages, ie.

<title>Car Parts - Page 2/3/4/5/6/etc</title>

Adding a page reference to your <h>tags is not necessary as the content of the page is still the same, just another page.</h>

Consider adding the title attribute to your paging links as well as a notifier:

Page 2

There are additional rel attribute values that can be helpful, too: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#type-links

[Jacobe]

Thanks Matthew. It's crystal clear to me now!

[Jacobe]

Thanks THB for that additional explanation. Lessons learned! Many thanks.

[Dr-Pete]

Just following up on Matthew's comment. The reason for the canonical to Page 2, in that example, is to cover any kind of additional duplicates, like sorts. For example, if you had URLs like:

1. http://www.domain.be/product-overview/2/price
2. http://www.domain.be/product-overview/2/rating

...where those pages sorted by price or product rating. Then, you'd want to canonical all sorted versions to "/2". In that case, the rel=prev/next tags should actually include "/price" and "/rating", depending on which page you're currently on. It's a mess, honestly, and I'm not thrilled with Google's implementation, but it seems to work fairly well.

Bing's implementation is limited, unfortunately.

FYI, if there are no other duplicates (just pagination), you don't really need the canonical. It won't hurt you, but it's unnecessary.

[Jacobe]

Hi Dr. Pete. Thanks a lot for your additional expertise. I think I've got a pretty good understanding how to use canonicals and pagination with eachother. Thanks!