Pagination & duplicate meta

[ViviCa1]

This post is deleted!

[ViviCa1]

As far as I am aware, there is nothing wrong with using both canonicals and pagination on the same page. Google says this as well here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en

We have pagination and canonicals set up as suggested in the Google article and also have some issues with Moz saying we have duplicate content, which the pagination should "fix" as far as I understand it.

From the article:

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:

[ViviCa1]

We have the exact same issue, and I found this reply from Dr. Pete helpful regarding this (assuming that what he says is still true): https://moz.com/community/q/pagination-issues-on-e-commerce-site-duplicate-page-title-and-content-on-moz-crawl

His reply:

Unfortunately, Moz Analytics/PRO don't process rel=prev/next properly at this time, so we may give false alarms on those pages, even if the tags are properly implemented.

It can be tricky, but Google recommends a combination of rel=canonical and rel=prev/next. Use the canonical tag to keep sorts from getting indexed, and then use rel=prev/next for the pagination itself. Your 3rd example (page=2...) should rel=prev/next to the URLs before and after it but then canonical to the page=2 variation with no sort parameter. It can get complicated fast, unfortunately, but typically rel=canonical can be implemented in the template. So, once you've got it figured out, it'll work for the entire site.

[CleverPhD]

I think you guys are missing the point.  Anything after the hashtag is ignored. As far as the crawler is concerned, all the links to page 2,3,4,5 are all the same URL - that is why the crawler does not see the other pages.

There is no issue with canonical or how it interacts with the rel next prev.  My point on the canonical was simply for illustrative purposes and looks to be implemented correctly.

Separate from the canonical the rel next prevs are setup incorrectly and that needs to be fixed once the issue with how the paginated pages are linked to using the URL with the hashtag parameters.

[LoganRay]

I get how hashes work.

Crawlers do see the page=2, page=3, etc. URLs because the right/left navigation buttons to the side of the numbers link to them. I just proved this by crawling the site in Screaming Frog and doing a search for page=, they're all found.

Becky, there's something larger at play here, potentially with your CMS configuration. It looks like the navigation for paginated sections is messed up. Mouse-over the links and look at the URL in the lower left of your browser, and then click the link and look at your URL bar. The results are very different from what you see on mouse-over. I'd recommend your first step is to talk to your developers and see if they can fix this issue. As VivaCa mentioned, you could be getting false alarms on duplicates here from Moz, so you might be clear with the canonical and prev/next fix - Screaming Frog finds all of those tags properly.

[BeckyKey]

Hi

Thank you for this. One thing I am confused about is, if Google doesn't crawl those paginated pages, why will it pick up the meta as duplicate?

Thank you for highlighting the links - I hadn't noticed this before.

Where should the rel next prev be coded?

Thanks for your feedback

[BeckyKey]

Hi,

Yes there is javascript to sort the results on those pages.

Is the solution to have these URLs page=2 etc, correctly linked from the page number?

Then ensure rel/prev are used correctly?

I'm also concerned about the content we have at the bottom of the products being shown as duplicate.

[CleverPhD]

I could write out how to implements rel next prev but it would be better to look at these articles

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

https://moz.com/ugc/seo-guide-to-google-webmaster-recommendations-for-pagination

[BeckyKey]

No problem thank you

[BeckyKey]

Regarding the links which point to pages, but include the hash. If Google is only seeing this page http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/workbenches

Will it be seeing these as pages which have duplicate content?