Is this the correct way of using rel canonical, next and prev for paginated content?
-
Hello Moz fellows,
a while ago (3-4 years ago) we setup our e-commerce website category pages to apply what Google suggested to correctly handle pagination.
We added rel "canonicals", rel "next" and "prev" as follows:
On page 1:
On page 2:
On page 3:
And so on, until the last page is reached:
Do you think everything we have been doing is correct?
I have doubts on the way we have handled the canonical tag, so, any help to confirm that is very appreciated!
Thank you in advance to everyone.
-
Fantastic, thank you Paul! Those links are very useful, and I might have already read those when I setup those canonicals (I jut forgot after a few years to have worked on that!)
I'll check them out carefully again
Appreciated your help and prompt reply
All the best,
Fabrizio
-
Yup, that's exactly correct - just the way you first proposed.
And if you want it straight from the horse's mouth, here's Google's own description of implementation best practice for your exact situation:
rel="next" and rel="previous" on the one hand and rel="canonical" on the other constitute independent concepts.Both declarations can be included in the same page.
For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain:
Note the canonical for the page is self referential to the version of the page including the basic variable that defines the actual page, leaving out the more dynamic variable of sessionID - the same way you'd want to leave out the dynamic size or colour variables, for example, which are specific to only that visit.
From https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
With a big whack of followup confirmation in this discussion with Google Engineer Maile Ohye https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/webmasters/YbXqwoyooGM/0XTh-gIxS7YJDon't forget you can also use the tools in GSC to help GoogleBot understand which of your URL variables are indexable and which should be ignored. Only helps Google itself, but hey, every little bit counts
Good luck!
Paul
-
Thank you Paul, so, what I have been doing so far is correct, right? Here it is again, please, confirm so I can close this thread:
On page 1:
On page 2:
On page 3:
And so on, until the last page is reached:
Is this the correct way to do it then?
-
You want to have each of your paginated category pages include a self-referential canonical tag, Fabrizo, for exactly the reason you mention - to protect the paginated pages from additional variables creating more dupe indexed pages.
Paul
-
Thank you for your reply, but I am sorry Logan, I am confused, you said:
Regarding your recent question about links, a self-referring canonical on those pages will handle that.
So, if I had to follow what you said above, I should add the following canonicals on these pages:
Page 1:
http://www.mysite.com/category/
Page 2:
http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=2
Page 3:
http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=3
But then you said that I don't have to put any canonicals except for the first page... so, I am confused... sorry!
Fact is, all pages may have extra parameters that could cause duplicates, therefore, how can I tackle that without adding a canonical on each page pointing to the "clean" URL without extra parameters? I hope you understand what I mean...
-
No, you do not need a canonical on any page other than page=1. Refer to Andy's set of examples above. What he laid out is exactly how I markup for pagination.
-
Thank you Logan.
So, even if I am on page 4, the canonical must points always to the root? I think I read somewhere that it should point to the page URL without the extra parameters like this:
http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=4
Am I wrong?
-
Yes, you only need the canonical tag on the root (as a self-referring canonical) and on page=1 of your paginated URLs. Regarding your recent question about links, a self-referring canonical on those pages will handle that.
Example:
On this URL- http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=4&orderby=title&view=list
Canonicalize to- http://www.mysite.com/category/
Hope that's helpful!
-
I am sorry, but I haven't received an answer to my last inquiry above, I can't close this thread.
-
Another question: what about links on those pages that can take the crawl to possible duplicate because of parameters added to the URL like:
http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=4&orderby=title
http://www.mysite.com/category/?cp=4&orderby=title&view=list
etc.? That's probably why we added the canonical I talked about above.... your thoughts?
-
Sorry, it is my understanding I have to leave the canonical just on the first page, is that correct?
Thank you again.
-
Oh, thank you Andy and Logan! So, can I remove the canonical tag altogether?
Thank you so much!
All the best,
Fabrizio
-
I'm with Logan here, Fabrizio. Rel next & prev pagination removes the need to canonical as well. So it would look like this:
Page 1:
Page 2:
Page 3:
It's Google way of understanding that there are similar pages that you wish to lead visitors to.
-Andy
-
Hi,
You don't need the self-referring canonical tags on each of the paginated URLs. Other than that it looks good to go.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO implications of using Marketing Automation landing pages vs on-site content
Hi there, I'm hoping someone can help here... I'm new to a company where due to the limitations of their Wordpress instance they've been creating what would ordinarily be considered pages in the standard sitemap as landing pages in their Pardot marketing automation platform. The URL subdomain is slightly different. Just wondering if anybody could quickly outline the SEO implications of doing this externally instead of directly on their site? Hope I'm making some sense... Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | philremington
Phil1 -
Penalties for duplicate content
Hello!We have a website with various city tours and activities listed on a single page (http://vaiduokliai.lt/). The list changes accordingly depending on filtering (birthday in Vilnius, bachelor party in Kaunas, etc.). The URL doesn't change. Content changes dynamically. We need to make URL visible for each category, then optimize it for different keywords (for example city tours in Vilnius for a list of tours and activities in Vilnius with appropriate URL /tours-in-Vilnius).The problem is that activities overlap very often in different categories, so there will be a lot of duplicate content on different pages. In such case, how severe penalty could be for duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jpuzakov0 -
Pagination and View All Pages Question. We currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to View all as I don't believe it's a good user experience so how best we deal with this.
Hello All, I have an eCommerce site and have implemented the use rel="prev" and rel="next" for Page Pagination. However, we also have a View All which shows all the products but we currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to this as I don't believe showing the user a page with shed loads of products on it is actually a good user experience so we havent done anything with this page. I have a sample url from one of our categories which may help - http://goo.gl/9LPDOZ This is obviously causing me duplication issues as well . Also , the main category pages has historically been the pages which ranks better as opposed to Page 2, Page 3 etc etc. I am wondering what I should do about the View All Page and has anyone else had this same issue and how did they deal with it. Do we just get rid of the View All even though Google says it prefers you to have it ? I also want to concentrate my link juice on the main category pages as opposed being diluted between all my paginated pages ? - Does anyone have any tips on how to best do this and have you seen any ranking improvement from this ? Any ideas greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
Appropriate Use of Canonical Tag
Hello, I am creating study guides for books with tabbed elements for each study guide. For example, for Othello, I'd have 3 tabs like so: 1. Overview page = xyz.com/othello 2. Context = xyz.com/othello/context 3. Characters = xyz.com/othello/characters I noticed that YouTube channels have tabbed elements and use the canonical. For example, all of the tabbed sections on https://www.youtube.com/user/Nerdist/channels have this canonical http://www.youtube.com/user/Nerdist"> In my case, would it be a correct use of the canonical tag to include rel="canonical" href = http://xyz.com/othello on each of the tabbed pages? Also, where exactly in the header should the canonical be placed? Before or after open graph / twitter cards?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stageagent0 -
Will using 301 redirects to reduce duplicate content on a massive scale within a domain hurt the site?
We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages. We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Silkstream
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices). We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page. Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank. Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!0 -
How To Remve Rel Canonical Error from site
Hello friends, I have a site there I install all in one SEO plugin when I add my site at seomoz.org after the crawling results it so there are a penalty of Rel Conanical tag error but when I see my editor code there I see that all in one seo automatically giving rel conanical tag. Now I don’t understand that why seomoz giving these errors. Please help me to resolve this problem.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KLLC0 -
Content linking ?
If you have links on the left hand side of the website on the Navigation and content at the bottom of the page and link to the same page with different anchor text or the same would it help the page (as it is surrounded by similar text) or is the first one counted and this is it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Does google can read the content of one Iframe and use it for the pagerank?
Beginners doubt: When one website has its content inside Iframe's, google will read it and consider for the pagerank?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Naghirniac0