On-Page SEO of the SEOmoz Blog Section
-
Hey Everyone
My brain isn't working (only had 1 cup of coffee so far - #2 on it's way) this morning and I could use some help.
We're creating a blog on a site for a client of ours and I've been looking at the SEOmoz blog for best practices when it comes to the implementation of pagination, canonical tags and noindex.
My questions:
- There is no use of the canonical tag on the main blog page or any of the paginated pages but it is being used on blog post pages. Why not use it on the main blog pages as well? I'm assuming because the blog pages are always changing with different content there is not much point?
- Paginated pages in the category sections i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1?page=2 are noindexed but paginated pages in the main blog section i.e. http://www.seomoz.org/blog?page=2 are not. Is this because of a duplicate content concern since the posts in the category sections are in the main blog section as well? If that's the case, why wouldn't the main category page i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/1 be noindexed as well?
- What's the reason for noindexing the "Show # Posts" pages i.e.http://www.seomoz.org/blog?show=5 ? I'm assuming another concern of duplicate content?
Any insights into these questions would be greatly appreciated and would help with the implementation of our clients blog.
Thanks,
Ken
-
Hey Ruth!
Thanks so much for the response and answers to my questions. You helped solidify what I was already thinking. I was wondering why the rel=next and rel=prev tags weren't being used. I thought for sure SEOmoz would be on the forefront of new on-page SEO techniques. Totally get the whole "do as we say, not as we do" mantra though.
One question though: You said you noindex category pages' pagination because of duplicate content; that the items also exist in the main blog's pagination as well. But, don't the items on the main category landing pages exist in the main blog as well? So wouldn't that be duplicate content as well?
BTW - Congrats on the new role as the Lead SEO, must be exciting!
Thanks,
Ken
-
Hi Ken,
Thanks for looking to our blog as an example - I wish we could be the perfect example of on-page SEO that we want to be, but like a lot of big, oldish websites we've got a lot of room for improvement. Some of the things you've called out are on my wish list to fix. In general when it comes to SEOmoz.org, a "do as we say, not as we do" attitude can be useful. I'll try to answer your questions with "what we should be doing" instead of "what we are doing."
- The only page within the blog that we might wish to self-canonical (as we do on individual post pages) would be www.seomoz.org/blog, which we probably should be doing. I don't think there's as much point in self-canonicaling subsequent pagination, since as you say the blog pages are always changing. In general we do like to put a canonical tag on each page canonicaling it back to itself, so query parameters and other referring data don't cause problems with duplicate URLs/content.
- Rather than noindexing paginated pages in the main blog, I would like to see us start using rel=prev and rel=next. You can learn more about that here.http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html. The reason that we noindex category pages' pagination is that it becomes duplicate content, since all of those items are also appearing in the main blog's pagination as well. We do want the main category pages to be indexed because we want people searching on those specific categories to be able to find them; we've had a lot of discussion in the MozPlex lately about how to give those pages some relevant unique content and make them more of a useful destination for people searching on specific topics. You may see some changes to these, although right now it's a bit low on my list of things to update.
- We noindex the "show # of pages" pages because of duplicate content concerns, and I suggest you do the same.
Thanks for your question, and please let me know if you have any more.
-
I don't work for SEOmoz, so I can't say exactly why they do what they do, but as far as I know the canonical tag would be used on the index page of their site. As this is where it would be need to let google know if it's www.seomoz.com or seomoz.com.
As far as the pagination it's sounds like you answered that already, trying to stop duplicate content from being indexed. The same with noindexing the show post pages.
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
-
Content change within the same URL/Page (UX vs SEO)
Context: I'm asking my client to create city pages so he can present all of his appartements in that specific sector so i can have a page that ranks for "appartement for rent in +sector". The page will present a map with all the sector so the user can navigate and choose the sector he wants after he landed on the page. Question: The UX team is asking if we absolutly need to reload the sector page when the user is clicking the location on the map or if they can switch the content within the same page/url once the user is on the landing page. My concern: 1. Can this be analysed as duplicate content if Google can crawl within the javascript app or if Google only analyse his "first view" of the page. 2. Do you consider that it would be preferable to keep the "page change" so i'm increasing the number of page viewed ?
Technical SEO | | alexrbrg0 -
Redirecting a blog
We've acquired another company and want to redirect their soon-to-be-obsolete website to ours. It includes a blog with many blog posts. Should we: only 301 redirect the top level blog URL
Technical SEO | | Caro-O
try redirect individual blogs to blogs of a similar topic on our site (least practical I'm sure)
redirect all their individual posts to our main blog URL Thanks, Caro1 -
Is blog.example.com ok for seo benefits?
our blog is currently setup as blog.example.com is this OK for seo benefits for the main domain example.com? is there any benefit specifically for the domain level by having the blog set-up as example.com/blog? would it be worth the effort to do this on a large blog? thanks
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram0 -
Advice on improve this content page for seo and google
Hi, i use joomla and i am looking for some help to find out what i should be doing to make my content pages better for seo and google. I would be grateful if people would look at the following page as an example http://www.in2town.co.uk/trip-advisor/top-american-ski-resorts-for-over-50s and let me know what i should be doing to make it better for seo and for google so people can find the page. I am using the above page as an example so i can learn from it. I would be grateful if people could look at the source code for the page to see if there is anything that should be in their that is not and if i should be looking at any joomla plugins for the content pages to improve the seo of the page. Any help to improve my seo for my content pages would be great. many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
If my home page never shows up in SERPS but other pages do, does that mean Google is penalizing me?
So my website I do local SEO for, xyz.com is finally getting better on some keywords (Thanks SEOMOZ) But only pages that are like this xyz.com/better_widgets_ or xyz.com/mousetrap_removals Is Google penalizing me possibly for some duplicate content websites I have out there (working on, I know I know it is bad)...
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
I am trying to correct error report of duplicate page content. However I am unable to find in over 100 blogs the page which contains similar content to the page SEOmoz reported as having similar content is my only option to just dlete the blog page?
I am trying to correct duplicate content. However SEOmoz only reports and shows the page of duplicate content. I have 5 years worth of blogs and cannot find the duplicate page. Is my only option to just delete the page to improve my rankings. Brooke
Technical SEO | | wianno1680 -
Secondary Pages Indexed over Primary Page
I have 4 pages for a single product Each of the pages link to the Main page for that product Google is indexing the secondary pages above my preferred landing page How do I fix this?
Technical SEO | | Bucky0 -
SEOMoz is finding jpegs on my site and reporting them as pages with missing meta titles
SEOMoz has just done a crawl of my site, and found 600 pages with missing meta title errors. When I have checked the list of these pages, they are all jpegs and not pages. Why is SEOMoz reporting that this .jpg files have missing meta titles on my site, which is www.webmakercms.com? SEOMoz has run several crawls of my site and this is the first time it has brought up this list of jpegs as errors and I don't understand why?
Technical SEO | | mfrgolfgti1