On-Page SEO of the SEOmoz Blog Section

[noBulMedia]

Hey Everyone

My brain isn't working (only had 1 cup of coffee so far - #2 on it's way) this morning and I could use some help.

We're creating a blog on a site for a client of ours and I've been looking at the SEOmoz blog for best practices when it comes to the implementation of pagination, canonical tags and noindex.

My questions:

1. There is no use of the canonical tag on the main blog page or any of the paginated pages but it is being used on blog post pages. Why not use it on the main blog pages as well? I'm assuming because the blog pages are always changing with different content there is not much point?
2. Paginated pages in the category sections i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1?page=2 are noindexed but paginated pages in the main blog section i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog?page=2 are not. Is this because of a duplicate content concern since the posts in the category sections are in the main blog section as well? If that's the case, why wouldn't the main category page i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1 be noindexed as well?
3. What's the reason for noindexing the "Show # Posts" pages i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog?show=5 ? I'm assuming another concern of duplicate content?

Any insights into these questions would be greatly appreciated and would help with the implementation of our clients blog.

Thanks,

Ken

[ScottJames13]

I don't work for SEOmoz, so I can't say exactly why they do what they do, but as far as I know the canonical tag would be used on the index page of their site. As this is where it would be need to let google know if it's www.seomoz.com or seomoz.com.

As far as the pagination it's sounds like you answered that already, trying to stop duplicate content from being indexed. The same with noindexing the show post pages.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Hi Ken,

Thanks for looking to our blog as an example - I wish we could be the perfect example of on-page SEO that we want to be, but like a lot of big, oldish websites we've got a lot of room for improvement. Some of the things you've called out are on my wish list to fix. In general when it comes to SEOmoz.org, a "do as we say, not as we do" attitude can be useful. I'll try to answer your questions with "what we should be doing" instead of "what we are doing."

1. The only page within the blog that we might wish to self-canonical (as we do on individual post pages) would be www.seomoz.org/blog, which we probably should be doing.  I don't think there's as much point in self-canonicaling subsequent pagination, since as you say the blog pages are always changing. In general we do like to put a canonical tag on each page canonicaling it back to itself, so query parameters and other referring data don't cause problems with duplicate URLs/content.
2. Rather than noindexing paginated pages in the main blog, I would like to see us start using rel=prev and rel=next.  You can learn more about that here.http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html. The reason that we noindex category pages' pagination is that it becomes duplicate content, since all of those items are also appearing in the main blog's pagination as well.  We do want the main category pages to be indexed because we want people searching on those specific categories to be able to find them; we've had a lot of discussion in the MozPlex lately about how to give those pages some relevant unique content and make them more of a useful destination for people searching on specific topics. You may see some changes to these, although right now it's a bit low on my list of things to update.
3. We noindex the "show # of pages" pages because of duplicate content concerns, and I suggest you do the same.

Thanks for your question, and please let me know if you have any more.

[noBulMedia]

Hey Ruth!

Thanks so much for the response and answers to my questions. You helped solidify what I was already thinking. I was wondering why the rel=next and rel=prev tags weren't being used. I thought for sure SEOmoz would be on the forefront of new on-page SEO techniques. Totally get the whole "do as we say, not as we do" mantra though.

One question though: You said you noindex category pages' pagination because of duplicate content; that the items also exist in the main blog's pagination as well. But, don't the items on the main category landing pages exist in the main blog as well? So wouldn't that be duplicate content as well?

BTW - Congrats on the new role as the Lead SEO, must be exciting!

Thanks,

Ken