Index, follow on a paginated page with a different rel=canonical URL

[Choice]

Hello,

I have a question about meta robots ="index, follow" and rel=canonical on category page pagination.

Should the sorted page be <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"></meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> since the  rel="canonical" is pointing to a separate page that is different from the URL?

Any thoughts on this topic would be awesome. Thanks.

Main Category Page
https://www.site.com/category/
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"><link rel="canonical" href="https: www.site.com="" category="" "=""></link rel="canonical" href="https:></meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

Sorted Page
https://www.site.com/category/?p=2&dir=asc&order=name
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"=""><link rel="canonical" href="https: www.site.com="" category="" ?p="2""></link rel="canonical" href="https:></meta name="robots" content="index,>

As you can see, the meta robots is telling Google to index https://www.site.com/category/?p=2&dir=asc&order=name , yet saying the canonical page is https://www.site.com/category/?p=2 .

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Choice

This will clear it up for you:

1. You don't need index follow on any of these pages as that is the default setting anyway. The only reason I would use a robots tag is if I wanted to noindex a page.

2. Sorted Page and Pagination of sorted pages - remove the index/follow and replace with a self-referencing canonical tag to the main category

rel="canonical" href=

https://www.site.com/category/

You do not want sorted pages and pagination of sorted pages appearing in Google. You just want them pointing back to the main category.

That will tell Google to ignore the sorted URL and index the core URL.

3. Paginated page

For pagination, you need to add rel=prev and rel=next (You don't need a canonical) - this is just for category pagination.

Still relevant for pagination:

https://moz.com/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience

Just don't get confused between sort pages (low grade) and pagination (needed for Google to crawl all the content & links) and don't let Google index any of the sorted pages.

Regards

Nigel