Whats the best way to implement rel = “next/prev” if we have filters?

[Yehoshua]

Hi everyone,

The filtered view results in paginated content and has different urls: example: https://modli.co/dresses.html?category=45&price=13%2C71&size=25

Look at what it says in search engine land: http://searchengineland.com/implementing-pagination-attributes-correctly-for-google-114970

Look at Advanced Techniques paragraph. do you agree? it seem like google will index the page multiple times for every filter variant.

Thanks,

Yehoshua

[DirkC]

Hi,

You might want to check this article of Google on facetted navigation: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.be/2014/02/faceted-navigation-best-and-5-of-worst.html

In your current set-up - Google isn't indexing pages of type https://modli.co/dresses.html?category=45&price=13%2C71&size=25 as these pages are only accessible using javascript (you can check this by crawling the site by using Screaming Frog or just using site:modli.co in Google) - so adding the rel next/previous will not change a lot for these pages.

If you want to make this pages accessible you will have to

• make this pages accessible using HTML links rather than js
• rewrite the parameters in your url's to make them more understandable for Search engines (https://modli.co/dresses.html?category=42 should become https://modli.co/dresses.html?category=elegant)
• use rel next/previous if pages are spread over multiple pages
• use canonical url's to eliminate parameters irrelevant for search (like size, price,...)
• eliminate potential duplicate content issues: both https://modli.co/dresses.html?category=42 & https://modli.co/dresses/elegant.html are showing elegant dresses

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[Yehoshua]

Hi Dirk,

I do not won't this pages to be accessible since then we will have lots of duplicate content.

Before i added canonical tags to all the category pages, lots of them where indexed by google (i have no clue way). Therefor we added the canonical.

What do you think of the following:

On all filtered pages have canonical tags to the main category page (the first one)

and category pages without filters have rel = “next/prev”.

what do you think?

Thanks,

Yehoshua

[DirkC]

Just be sure that I understand what you're saying:

On pages like https://modli.co/dresses/elegant.html & https://modli.co/dresses.html you want to use rel next/rel previous.

On pages like https://modli.co/dresses.html?category=43&size=25 you plan to use a canonical to https://modli.co/dresses.html

Seem like a good strategy - the only minus is that you would not have a corresponding landing page for somebody looking for "red dress" (page exist on site but points to the generic dresses page). Not sure if these type of queries represent a search volume & if they would be important for your business.

rgds,

Dirk

PS You should check the H1 you use on your pages - on https://modli.co/dresses/elegant.html the H1 is "Elegant" - would be much better if it would be "Elegant dresses"