Canonical url with pagination

[coremediadesign]

I would like to find out what is the standard approach for sections of the site with large number of records being displayed using pagination. They don't really contain the same content, but if title tag isn't changed it seem to process it as duplicate content where the parameter in the url indicating the next page is used.

For the time being I've added ' : Page 1' etc. at the end of the title tag for each separate page with the results, but is there a better way of doing it? Should I use the canonical url here pointing to the main page before pagination shows up in the url?

[WrightIMC]

I think this is going to depend on two things: 1. Your Site Structure and If you want those pages indexed.

Rand Fishkin - recommends for paginated results not to put the canonical tag pointing back to the top page, which I agree.

Site Structure

If the final pages can only be found by going through the paginated structure, you'll definitely want them followed. You'd only want to no-follow to prioritize your crawl rate, but not recommended unless you have multiple formats (see the article above).

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569&ctx=cb&src=cb&cbid=ncoerm6lk3c9&cbrank=1

Indexed

If the content is unique (usually blog content) and you are getting traffic to those pages from searches then it may be worthwhile to keep them indexed.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710

[marcinlejman]

Hi Sebastian,

actually, there's a very clean solution which is fully supported by Google - just use rel="next" and rel="prev" in your paginated links to indicate relationships between pages.

Here's a recent discussion of the best practices from Google itself, and here's another comment by Yoast (famous for his Wordpress SEO plugin).

Hope it helps.

[coremediadesign]

These pages obviously contain different items and each page only shares the same title and meta tags.

Marcin - do you think that if I add the rel attribute that will solve the problem? Will the Moz reports actually pick it and won't mark it as Duplicate Content and Title?

[Dr-Pete]

So, I have to say that I'm actually upset about Google's recent recommendations, because they've presented them as if their simple and definitive, whereas they're actually very complicated to implement and don't always work very well. A couple of problems:

(1) Rel=prev/next is a fairly weak signal. If you're just trying to help the crawlers, it's fine. If you have issues with large-scale duplication (or have been hit with Panda), it's not a good fix, in my experience.

(2) Rel=prev/next isn't honored at all by Bing.

(3) It's actually really tough to code, especially their proposed Rel=prev/next + Rel=canonical solution.

There are a couple of other options:

(a) If you have a "View All" page (or if that's feasible without it being huge), you can rel-canonical to it from all of the paginated pages.

(b) You can META NOINDEX, FOLLOW pages 2+. I find that's a lot easier and usually more effective. Again, it depends on the severity of the problem and scope of the paginated content.

If you're not having problems and can manage the implementation, Rel=prev/next is a decent first step.

I should add that this is assuming you mean internal search results, and not content pagination (like paginated articles). With paginated search, the additional pages usually aren't a good search-user experience (Google visitors don't need to land on Page 11 of 17 of your search results), so I find that proactively managing them is a good thing. It really does depend a lot on the scope and the size of your index, though. This is a very complex issue that tends to get oversimplified.

[DavidLenehan]

Anyone use "no-index" and "follow" for page 2 , page 3 etc? Does this work?

[Dr-Pete]

It does, although Google seems to be slightly less fond of it over time. Since I wrote my reply in March, rel=prev/next are actually beginning to be more effective. I've never seen any major issues with NOINDEX'ing pages 2+, though. In many cases, it's just a lot easier to implement.

The big issue this year is that Google sometimes just ignores deindexation signals. So, you really have to try it and see.

I'd also add that I'm talking about search pagination here, not article pagination. Rel=prev/next is a much better choice for article pagination, because the content is unique across pages. Indexing page 11 of search results isn't much of a benefit, in most cases.

[DavidLenehan]

Thanks.

[CaptainContrat]

Does Moz manage crawling through Wordpress paginated posts (with tags rel="next" / "prev") ?

Since I divided long posts in two posts (page 1 and page 2) using "nextpage" feature in Wordpress, Moz shows duplicate title between page 1 and page 2. For example : https://captaincontrat.com/guide/societe-en-cours-de-formation/ and https://captaincontrat.com/guide/societe-en-cours-de-formation/2/

Thanks a lot

[Worship_Digital]

Moz crawls paginated pages even if you have added the rel="next" and rel="prev".