Category Pages - Canonical, Robots.txt, Changing Page Attributes

[Troyville]

A site has category pages as such:  www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc...

This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate).  Below are the options that we've been thinking about:

a.  Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages).  All pages have unique product listings.

b.  Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page.

c.  Robots.txt on subsequent pages.

d. ?

Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages.

Any help on this would be much appreciated.  Thank you.

[Function5]

I think that generally speaking you want to block search engines from indexing your category pages (use your sitemap and robots.txt to do this). I could be totally wrong here but that is how I setup my sites.

[rhutchings]

Ahh... the ultimate IA question that still doesnt have a clear anwer from the search engines.  A ton of talk about this at the recent SMX Advanced at Seattle (as is with almost every one).  I will try and summarize the common sentiment that i gathered from other pros.  I will not claim that this is the correct way, but for now this is what i heard a bunch of people agree on:

1. No index, follow the pagination links for all except page 1
2. Do not block/hand it with robots.txt (in your case, you realyl cant since you have no identifying parameters in your url)
3. If you had paginated parameters in the url you can also manage those in the Google & Bing  WMT by telling the SE to ignore those certain parameters.
4. Canonical to page 1 was a strategy that some retailers were using, and other want to try.  Google reps tried to say this is not the way to do it, but others claim success from it.
5. If you have a "View All" link that would display all the products in a longer form on a single page, canonical to that page (if its reasonable)

Notes: Depending on how your results/pages are generated, you will need to remember that they probably arent passing "juice".  Any dynamic content is usually not "flow through" links from an SEO perspective (or even crawled sometimes).

The better approach to not orphaning your product pages is finding ways to link to them from other sources besides the results pages.  For larger sites, its a hassle, buts thats a challenge we all face    Here are some SEO tips for attacking the "orphan" issue:

1. If you have product feeds, create a "deal" or "price change" feed.  Create a twitter account that people can sign up for to follow these new deals or price changes on products.  Push in your feed into tweets, and these will link to your product page, hence creating an in-link for search engines to follow.
2. Can do the same with blogs or facebook, but not on a mass scale.  Something a bit more useful for users like "top 10 deals of the week) and link to 10 products, or "Favorites for gifts" or something. over time, you can keep track of which product you recommend, and make sure you eventually hit all your products.  Again, the point is creating at least 1 inbound link for search engines to follow.
3. Create a static internal "product index page" (this is not for your sitemap page FYI) where either by category or some other structure, you make a static link to every product page you have on the site.  Developers can have these links dynamically updated/inserted with some extra effort which will avoid manually needing to be updated.
4. Create a xml sitemap index.  Instead of everything being clumped into 1 xml sitemap for your site, try creating a sitemap index and with your product pages in their own sitemap.  This may help with indexing those pages.

Hope that helps?  Anyone else want to chime in?

[Troyville]

Thanks for the comprehensive response, Ryan; really great info here!

Would option A be out of the question in your mind due to the fact that the page attributes would be too similar even though unique content is on all the subsequent category pages?  I know this method isn't typical, however, it would be the most efficient way to address.

Note:  A big downside to this is also the fact that we will have multiple pages targeting the same keyword, however, since internally and externally, the main category pages are getting more link love, would it still hurt to have all those subsequent pages getting indexed?

[rhutchings]

Option A doesnt do anything for you. I think the search engines flag duplicated title tags, even with different products on the page.

[Troyville]

Sorry, I don't think I clarified.  The page title and meta descriptions would be unique, however they would be almost the same except for it saying "Page [x}" somewhere within it.

[rhutchings]

Disagree. I think you are missing out big time here- category pages are the bread and butter for eCommerce sites.   Search engines have confirmed that these pages are of high value for users, and it gets you a chance to have optimized static content on a page that also shows product results.  All the major e retailers heavily rely on these pages (Amazon, ebay, zappos, etc...)

[rhutchings]

Either way, it will be tough to go that route and still get indexed.  Its a pagination issue that everyone would like a solution to, but there just isnt one.  It wont hurt you to do this, but wont ultimately get all those pages indexed like you want.

[Function5]

I see. I think the concern is with duplicate content though, right?