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Canonicalization for Pagination – Roundup of SEO Wisdom [UPDATED]

September 23, 2011
by Gradiva Couzin

Tongue twister, anyone? Pagination canonicalization is one of the trickier challenges for the technical SEO set today. We’ve been closely monitoring the hints and tips that occasionally drop from our favorite Googlers’ lips (sure, we all adore Matt Cutts, but let’s save a little love for JohnMu and Maile Ohye, shall we?). Here’s a roundup of good advice we’ve heard, along with our analysis and resulting recommendations.

Pagination is commonly seen on ecommerce sites when a category contains more products than can be listed on each page:

The question often arises: How should an SEO handle all of these pages? Allowing all of these pages to be indexed separately in search engines means indexing a lot of duplicate or near-duplicate content on a website, which dilutes SEO power and creates an undesirable user experience, since nobody particularly wants to click through from Google to a deep paginated page.

Here is the wisdom we’ve gathered from our favorite Googlers on the subject:

JohnMu on paginated pages and the canonical tag (Feb, 2010):

Pagination: this is complicated, I personally would be careful when using with rel=canonical with paginated lists. The important part is that we should be able to find all products listed, so at the very least those lists should provide a default sort order where we can access (and index) all pages. Since this is somewhat difficult unless you really, really know what you are doing, I would personally avoid adding rel=canonical for these pages. One possible solution could be to use JavaScript for paginated lists with different sort orders, for example, that way you would have a single URL which lists all products.

Our interpretation: Google needs to be able to see all of these paginated pages so that it can click through and get to all the individual links (product pages) that are listed on all the pages. JohnMu suggests creating a default page that contains all of the links, so that Google can get to them. Trouble is, what if you have a thousand of these links? Or even more.

At SMX West (March 2011), Maile Ohye noted that you shouldn’t use canonical tags for paginated pages. (We’ve heard her say this since 2010) Here are notes from Barry Schwartz (SEORoundtable) on this session:

Maile explained that since the results on pages 2, 3, 4, and 5 are different from page 1, you should not use the canonical tag here.
Not only that, if you do, Google may ignore it because Google uses methods to determine if the canonical tag command is actually something valid for that case. So if you canonical page 2 to page 1 and page 2 is not similar enough to page 1, Google may ignore your canonical tag.

Our interpretation: Since paginated pages aren’t identical to each other, and they aren’t subsets of each other, they shouldn’t be canonicalized to each other. Google is pretty smart and can probably figure out when it’s dealing with page=1, page=2, page=3, and Google may ignore your canonical tags in this case.

The one exception to the no canonical tags for pagination rule is when you have a “view all” page. As Brian Ussery of SEO firm Nine by Blue notes:

If paginated content uses “view all” page if it loads well you can put rel canonical on those URLs.
If you don’t have a “view all” page 2 isn’t a subset so you can’t use rel canonical.

At the end of the day, our two favored pagination approaches are the following:

noindex,follow
Place a robots meta tag on all deep paginated pages instructing the robots to “noindex, follow” the page. This will allow Google to visit the deep pages, follow links on these pages, but not index these pages.
“view all” + canonical
Create a “view all” page showing all of the links on your list. Then, on all other paginated pages (including page 1), add a canonical tag identifying the “view all” page as the canonical form. We think this solution is best used when the “view all” page is also the version of the page that is linked from elsewhere on the site.

UPDATE: Google got its act together and created a better way to deal with pagination canonicalization. Read all about it at Google’s webmaster blog.

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Ask the Experts: Semantic Tags for Rich Snippets

July 18, 2011
by Gradiva Couzin

Q: I’m confused. What are Schema.org tags and are these the same as semantic tags for rich snippets? Which ones should I use?

A: Have you ever wondered how some websites’ listings in Google and Bing get those great-looking review stars, price ranges, and other enhancements, like the ones shown here?

This is all achieved through the magic of semantic tagging. Semantic tagging allows website owners to put tags around their content to help search engines understand the meaning of that content. Say a website owner put a <price> tag around the price of a product: <price>14.99</price>. That would help a search engine understand that it’s looking at the price of the product. Then, the search engine can use this information to improve its listings for your site.

Semantic tags for rich snippets have been supported by Google for years, but the new Schema.org tagging expands the type of information that can be tagged, and is also supported by Bing. Here’s a quick overview:

Semantic tagging per Schema.org. This was recently announced by Google and Bing and is remarkable for being supported by both of the rival search engines. Because Schema.org tagging is still very new, we don’t know exactly how it will be used by Google and Bing, but we expect that it will be used to improve search engine listings with rich snippets, and could help with positioning in Shopping search.

Semantic tagging for rich snippets using microformats or RDFa. This is an older form of semantic tagging that has been supported by Google for at least a couple of years. It uses a different format than Schema.org tagging but provides some of the same information. It is more limited than Schema.org tagging and only provides a few pieces of information about a product, including name of product, price, availability, and the number of review stars.

Which one should you use? We recommend Schema.org because it is fully supported by both major search engines, Google and Bing.

Are there any possible downsides to using semantic tagging? Yes. Semantic tagging could help search engines create content pages that give visitors the information they’re looking for without clicking through to your site. Many website owners already feel that Google News, Google Places and Google Shopping have intercepted potential visitors to their site. Some content creators think search engines are becoming no better than content scrapers that steal content from their websites. Weigh this concern against the benefits of having enhanced listings on search engines. As SEOs, we continue to lean toward doing everything we can to feed quality information to search engines, but a dose of healthy skepticism never hurt anyone.

Readers: are you using rich snippets? Have you seen more traffic, or are you concerned about search engines scraping your content?

Canonicalization for Pagination – Roundup of SEO Wisdom [UPDATED]

UPDATE: Google got its act together and created a better way to deal with pagination canonicalization. Read all about it at Google’s webmaster blog.

Ask the Experts: Semantic Tags for Rich Snippets

Q: I’m confused. What are Schema.org tags and are these the same as semantic tags for rich snippets? Which ones should I use?

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