Will I still get Duplicate Meta Data Errors with the correct use of the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags?

[gkgrant]

Hi Guys,

One of our sites has an extensive number category page lsitings, so we implemented the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags for these pages (as suggested by Google below), However, we still see duplicate meta data errors in SEOMoz crawl reports and also in Google webmaster tools. Does the SEOMoz crawl tool test for the correct use of rel="next" and "prev" tags and not list meta data errors, if the tags are correctly implemented?

Or, is it necessary to still use unique meta titles and meta descriptions on every page, even though we are using the rel="next" and "prev" tags, as recommended by Google?

Thanks, George

Implementing rel=”next” and rel=”prev”

If you prefer option 3 (above) for your site, let’s get started! Let’s say you have content paginated into the URLs:

http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4

On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1, you’d include in the section:

On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2:

On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3:

And on the last page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4:

A few points to mention:

• The first page only contains rel=”next” and no rel=”prev” markup.

• Pages two to the second-to-last page should be doubly-linked with both rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup.

• The last page only contains markup for rel=”prev”, not rel=”next”.

• rel=”next” and rel=”prev” values can be either relative or absolute URLs (as allowed by the tag). And, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.

• rel=”next” and rel=”prev” only need to be declared within the  section, not within the document .

• We allow rel=”previous” as a syntactic variant of rel=”prev” links.

• rel="next" and rel="previous" on the one hand and rel="canonical" on the other constitute independent concepts. Both declarations can be included in the same page. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain:

• rel=”prev” and rel=”next” act as hints to Google, not absolute directives.

• When implemented incorrectly, such as omitting an expected rel="prev" or rel="next" designation in the series, we'll continue to index the page(s), and rely on our own heuristics to understand your content.

[irvingw]

You will still need unique title and meta tags to avoid duplication. It's in the W3.org spec: Anything unique will work, so you can start the title and meta description tag on page 2 with the words "Page 2: "

<a name="h-12.1.2">12.1.2</a> <a name="idx-link-2">Other link relationships</a>

By far the most common use of a link is to retrieve another Web resource, as illustrated in the previous examples. However, authors may insert links in their documents that express other relationships between resources than simply "activate this link to visit that related resource". Links that express other types of relationships have one or more link types specified in their source anchor.

The roles of a link defined by <samp class="einst">A</samp> or <samp class="einst">LINK</samp> are specified via the <samp class="ainst">rel</samp> and <samp class="ainst">rev</samp> attributes.

For instance, links defined by the <samp class="einst">LINK</samp> element may describe the position of a document within a series of documents. In the following excerpt, links within the document entitled "Chapter 5" point to the previous and next chapters:

_...other head information..._
<title>Chapter 5</title>

[SharewarePros]

Dear George,

In the past I was dealing with the same issue, to solve it I implement these 2 fix :

1. Canonical tag ie.:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/your-page.asp">

This tell the Search engines specially google the page is the referred as canonical

http://www.yourdomain.com/your-page.asp

http://www.yourdomain.com/your-page.asp?page=1

http://www.yourdomain.com/your-page.asp?page=2

from google perspective these pages are http://www.yourdomain.com/your-page.asp (canonical)

2. On each page I add (dynamically) Page # on both title and description meta tags

<title></span><span>Your page title - Page: 1</span><span></title>

name="description" content="Your page Description meta tag etc etc - Page: 1">

This resolve the problem on both, HTML issues in Google WMT and the rank flow because you're joining all pages into the root page.

Hope this hepl

Claudio

[irvingw]

Google no longer recommends setting up pagination pages with canonical tags. The rel tags are the way to go...

[SharewarePros]

Dear Irving,

Im very interested in your concept could you explain in depth or give me any source or link where to learn about.

Because canonical from my point of view is a controversial thing.

I'll appreciate your help

Claudio

[irvingw]

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

3. While it’s fine to set rel=”canonical” from a component URL to a single view-all page, setting the canonical to the first page of a parameter-less sequence is considered improper usage. We make no promises to honor this implementation of rel=”canonical.”