Pagination & Canonicals

[BeckyKey]

Hi

I've been looking at how we paginate our product pages & have a quick question on canonicals.

Is this the right way to display..

Or should the canonical point to the main page http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/euro-containers-stacking-containers, so Google doesn't pick up duplicate meta information?

Thanks!

[GastonRiera]

Hi Becky,

As you said, the canonical has to point to the main page so Google doesn't index duplicate information.

Hope it helps.
GR.

[BeckyKey]

My only question is, what about the products on page 2 which aren't duplicate listings?

[GastonRiera]

You've asked what about duplicate meta information.

In the case that page 2 has different information than page 1, then you should't worry.
Still, you may want just to get indexed the main page (if that's the case), apply the canonical.

[LoganRay]

According to this article by Rand, you should not point a canonical back to the main page. If you're marking up pagination correctly, you do not need a canonical tag on the paginated URLs, only on page=1 pointing back to the main page since these are actually the same thing.

[ThompsonPaul]

Sorry, this response is incorrect. Canonicals used in this way will simply be ignored.

[ThompsonPaul]

Definitely agree with Logan - Google's own engineers also explain that rel-next and rel-previous are implemented independent of rel-canonical. (Meaning each page in a paginated series should have it's own self-referential canonical tag, not one pointing to the first page of the series.)

"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:

"

~~ from https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

Paul

[GastonRiera]

Yeap i got it wrong.
I'll leave it, so as others my learn from me.

[BeckyKey]

Great thank you for your advice.

Does anyone have an opinion on pagination vs. scroll instead?

[LoganRay]

I'd recommend pagination over scrolling. The primary reason being load time. If you've got 8 pages worth of content displaying on one page, it's going to take forever to load.

[BeckyKey]

Thanks everyone