How to deal with everscrolling pages?

[corusent]

A website keeps showing more articles when pressing a "load more" button. This loads additional category pages with a page parameter (e.g. ...?page=1, ...?page=2, etc.), as suggested by Google to get all pages indexed.

The problem is that this creates thousands of additional, duplicate pages, with a duplicate title, header, and very unfocused content. They also show as duplicate content in Moz. The pages are indexed by Google, but none of them is ranking. What do you guys think: add a no-follow to the load-more button, so search engines will never see them?

Thanks for your input!

[DirkC]

Hi

Did you check this article on infinite scrolling from Google Webmaster tools?

Without seeing the actual site it's just guessing - if you have thousands of pages that are listed I guess that it doesn't really make sense to use rel next/previous.

You could consider to only index the first page of the category and put a canonical on the remaining pages.

Are these category pages valuable as landing pages? If not - you could put noindex/follow to make sure that the underlying pages get indexed.

Hope this helps

Dirk

[corusent]

Yes, the pages are built just like stated in Google's article. And next/prev doesn't make sense, as the articles are not related. Canonicals are in place and direct to the category or tag page. The problem is that Google keeps on spidering those pages and signals 404- or 500-errors when there's changes or the server is busy. So we agree, I'll put on a noindex/nofollow on the "load more"-button.

Thanks Dirk!