Pagination V Canonical

[jazzah]

Hi Guys,

I am needing some help with regards to duplicate page content issues.

Using Zen Cart on an ecommerce platform and it is bringing up duplicate page content on pages. For instance:-

http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/

is the same as:-

http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/?sort=20a&page=1

Rel=Prev/Next as I understand it will treat

http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/?sort=20a&page=1

http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/?sort=20a&page=2

http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/?sort=20a&page=3

as one page but won't solve the issue of the duplicate content issues between:-

http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/

and

http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/?sort=20a&page=1

am I better using rel=Canonical here instead???

Kind Regards

Neil

[SEODinosaur]

Hi Neil,

Yes use rel=Canonical, by using this code you are telling Google which page to count.

[jazzah]

I have just read this post

http://www.seomoz.org/q/avoiding-duplicate-content-in-e-commerce-product-search-sorting-results

And Dr. Pete explains it well. However, If I use rel="canonical" and "rel=prev/next" together

would the rel=canonical be to this page http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/?sort=20a&page=1 or this page

http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-barnyard-bash-1st-birthday-c-67_321/

I am confused!!!

Kind Regards

Neil

[Marcus_Miller]

If we navigate yoursite outside of the pagination then the root page is this:

http://www.blissfulkidsparties.com.au/store/1st-birthday-themes-c-67/

I would use that but the big thing here is just to be consistent.

Hope that helps.

Marcus

[Dr-Pete]

So, technically, according to Google, the answer is really ugly. You should canonical to the page level (e.g. "page=2"), but then rel=prev/next to pages 1 and 3 with the same parameters have the current page. So, if you call page 2 with "sort=20" then, "sort=20" should be in the rel=prev/next tags, BUT the canonical should go to page 2 without the "sort=20".

Repeat this for every possible parameter, and welcome to Hell.

You could just use rel=prev/next with the base URLs, and then rel-canonical to the page level. The other option, though, is to hide these parameters completely. Could you store the results/page option in a cookie, for example (that's what I do on a lot of sites) or leave it default, unless someone changes it? If Google always gets the default, then they'll never see that in the URL.

You could also block the sort= parameter in Google Webmaster Tools, although I think combining that with rel=prev/next gets a bit messy.