Index, follow on a paginated page with a different rel=canonical URL
-
Hello,
I have a question about meta robots ="index, follow" and rel=canonical on category page pagination.
Should the sorted page be <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"></meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> since the rel="canonical" is pointing to a separate page that is different from the URL?
Any thoughts on this topic would be awesome. Thanks.
Main Category Page
https://www.site.com/category/
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"><link rel="canonical" href="https: www.site.com="" category="" "=""></link rel="canonical" href="https:></meta name="robots" content="index,follow">Sorted Page
https://www.site.com/category/?p=2&dir=asc&order=name
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"=""><link rel="canonical" href="https: www.site.com="" category="" ?p="2""></link rel="canonical" href="https:></meta name="robots" content="index,>As you can see, the meta robots is telling Google to index https://www.site.com/category/?p=2&dir=asc&order=name , yet saying the canonical page is https://www.site.com/category/?p=2 .
-
Hi Choice
This will clear it up for you:
1. You don't need index follow on any of these pages as that is the default setting anyway. The only reason I would use a robots tag is if I wanted to noindex a page.
2. Sorted Page and Pagination of sorted pages - remove the index/follow and replace with a self-referencing canonical tag to the main category
rel="canonical" href=
https://www.site.com/category/
You do not want sorted pages and pagination of sorted pages appearing in Google. You just want them pointing back to the main category.
That will tell Google to ignore the sorted URL and index the core URL.
3. Paginated page
For pagination, you need to add rel=prev and rel=next (You don't need a canonical) - this is just for category pagination.
Still relevant for pagination:
https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience
Just don't get confused between sort pages (low grade) and pagination (needed for Google to crawl all the content & links) and don't let Google index any of the sorted pages.
Regards
Nigel
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 From One Domain Mysteriously Indexing Under a Different Domain's URL
I've pulled out all the stops and so far this seems like a very technical issue with either Googlebot or our servers. I highly encourage and appreciate responses from those with knowledge of technical SEO/website problems. First some background info: Three websites, http://www.americanmuscle.com, m.americanmuscle.com and http://www.extremeterrain.com as well as all of their sub-domains could potentially be involved. AmericanMuscle sells Mustang parts, Extremeterrain is Jeep-only. Sometime recently, Google has been crawling our americanmuscle.com pages and serving them in the SERPs under an extremeterrain sub-domain, services.extremeterrain.com. You can see for yourself below. Total # of services.extremeterrain.com pages in Google's index: http://screencast.com/t/Dvqhk1TqBtoK When you click the cached version of there supposed pages, you see an americanmuscle page (some desktop, some mobile, none of which exist on extremeterrain.com😞 http://screencast.com/t/FkUgz8NGfFe All of these links give you a 404 when clicked... Many of these pages I've checked have cached multiple times while still being a 404 link--googlebot apparently has re-crawled many times so this is not a one-time fluke. The services. sub-domain serves both AM and XT and lives on the same server as our m.americanmuscle website, but answer to different ports. services.extremeterrain is never used to feed AM data, so why Google is associating the two is a mystery to me. the mobile americanmuscle website is set to only respond on a different port than services. and only responds to AM mobile sub-domains, not googlebot or any other user-agent. Any ideas? As one could imagine this is not an ideal scenario for either website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrewv0 -
Google is indexing the wrong pages
I have been having problems with Google indexing my website since mid May. I haven't made any changes to my website which is wordpress. I have a page with the title 'Peterborough Cathedral wedding', I search Google for 'wedding Peteborough Cathedral', this is not a competitive search phrase and I'd expect to find my blog post on page one. Instead, half way down page 4 I find Google has indexed www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/blog with the title 'wedding photojournalist | Portfolio', what google has indexed is a link to the blog post and not the blog post itself. I repeated this for several other blog posts and keywords and found similar results, most of which don't make any sense at all - A search for 'Menorca wedding photography' used to bring up one of my posts at the top of page one. Now it brings up a post titled 'La Mare wedding photography Jersey" which happens to have a link to the Menorca post at the bottom of the page. A search for 'Broadoaks country house weddng photography' brings up 'weddingphotojournalist | portfolio' which has a link to the Broadoaks post. a search for 'Blake Hall wedding photography' does exactly the same. In this case Google is linking to www.weddingphotojournalist.blog again, this is a page of recent blog posts. Could this be a problem with my sitemap? Or the Yoast SEO plugin? or a problem with my wordpress theme? Or is Google just a bit confused?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
How long does google index old urls?
Hey guys, We are currently in the process of redesigning a site but in two phases as the timeline issues. So there will be up to a 4 week gap between the 1st and 2nd set of redirects. These urls will be idle 4 weeks before the phase content is ready. What effect if any will this have on the domain and page authority? Thanks Rob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daracreative0 -
Rel=Canonical to Longer Page?
We've got a series of articles on the same topic and we consolidated the content and pasted it altogether on a single page. We linked from each individual article to the consolidated page. We put a noindex on the consolidated page. The problem: Inbound links to individual articles in the series will only count toward the authority of those individual pages, and inbound links to the full article will be worthless. I am considering removing the noindex from the consolidated article and putting rel=canonicals on each individual post pointing to the consolidated article. That should consolidate the PageRank. But I am concerned about pointing****a rel=canonical to an article that is not an exact duplicate (although it does contain the full text of the original--it's just that it contains quite a bit of additional text). An alternative would be not to use rel=canonicals, nor to place a noindex on the consolidated article. But then my concern would be duplicate content and unconsolidated PageRank. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo0 -
Issue: Rel Canonical
seomoz give me notices about rel canonical issues, how can i resolve it. any one can help me, what is rel canonical and how can i remove it
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | learningall0 -
Dynamic URLs Appearing on Google Page 1\. Convert to Static URLs or not?
Hi, I have a client who uses dynamic URLs thoughout his site. For SEO purposes, I've advised him to convert dynamic URLs to static URLs whenever possible. However, the client has a few dynamic URLs that are appearing on Google Page 1 for strategically valuable keywords. For these URLs, is it still worth it to 301 them to static URLs? In this case, what are the potential benefits and/or pitfalls?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mindflash0 -
Canonical tag for similar page with different theme.
Our commerce system allows products to be shared across multiple categories/sections of our site. E.G. /boxes/blue-box.html /circles/blue-box.html This enables the product to show up in different areas of the site, but does not link to an evergreen URL. We are considering using the canonical tag to resolve this issue, but our question relates to the similarity of the pages. Each section folder (e.g. /boxes/ and /circles/) has a different header, left navigation and footer. They are similar in layout and some content is the same, but a good portion is different in the header and nav. Each category nav basically deals with deeper links in it's own category. The product title, image, description, etc. is all the same and makes up the bulk of the page. Is this a good candidate for the canonical tag or should we attempt to accommodate an evergreen URL?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh-att0 -
Should I Allow Blog Tag Pages to be Indexed?
I have a wordpress blog with settings currently set so that Google does not index tag pages. Is this a best practice that avoids duplicate content or am I hurting the site by taking eligible pages out of the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JSOC0