Self referencing canonicals and paginated content - advice needed

[AndyMacLean]

Hi,

I help manage a large site that uses a lot of params for tracking, testing and to help deal with paginated content e.g. abc.com/productreview?page=2. The paginated review content correctly uses rel next and rel prev tags to ensure we get the value of all of the paginated review content that we have.

The volume of param exclusions I need to maintain in Google & Bing Webmaster tools is getting clunky and frustrating. I would like to use self referencing canonicals, which would make life a lot easier. Here's my issue:

• If I use canonicals on the review pages the paginated content urls would also use the same canonical e.g. /productreview?page=2 pointing to /productreview I believe I am going to lose the value of those reviews, even though they use the rel next rel prev tags. BTW airbnb do this - do they know something I don't, don't care about the paginated reviews, or are they doing it incorrectly, see http://d.pr/i/14mPU

Is my assertion above correct about losing the value of the paginated reviews if I use self referencing canonicals? Any thoughts on a solution to clearing up the param problem or do I have to live with it?

Thanks in advance,

Andy

[Daniel_Marks]

Hey Andy,

Could you use a self-referencing canonical that points back to the page itself (without irrelevant parameters) rather than the first page of the series? This is what amazon does. Ie: example.com?page-2&id=123 canonicals back to example.com?page-2

This is also what Google recommends: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

[AndyMacLean]

Hi,

Thanks for you advice.

I don't see what you see with Amazon, in fact I see something very strange - http://d.pr/i/1ik1T

The product reviews sit in their /product-review/ directory and these urls appear to be no index, no followed. They also have a canonical back to the original product page - why bother if the url is no indexed? If I've got that right it would seem Amazon don't get the full value of the millions of pages or product reviews they have?!

This from the Google url you referenced seems to sort out my problem thanks!

rel="next" and rel="prev" are orthogonal concepts to rel="canonical". You can include both declarations. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain: