A theory question here,
If I've got a paginated section on my website and the URL is
website.com/news
this page has multiple pages.
Should I automatically redirect visitors on /news to /news/page/1
If i leave it as both /news and /news/page/1 this will be duplicated content according to Google. Or is Google smart enough to tell if its the first page?
Whats the best practice to solve this?
You just need to tag yout pages correctly so that Google understands this is paginated content and won't penalize you for duplicate content.
Tag your pagination links with rel="next", and rel="prev", then rel="canonical" each paginated page to the full non-paginated version. For real users of course you do not redirect to non-paginated content ever.
If you do this Google will treat each paginated page as if it were one giant non-paginated page.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html
Related
I was searching on the web after I analyzed the link structure of Yoast. There he uses links to redirect users to a different page.
Here a example:
https://yoast.com/out/synthesis/
Can someone tell me what this is called, or how I create such links as well?
It's actually really simple. He isn't using it for SEO purposes since it's just a 301 redirect. He is purposefully hiding the affiliate url AND adding 'onclick' Google Analytics tracking to the link. Also - the "/out/" directory is being blocked by robots.txt and then redirect's back to the index page.
To answer your question:
This is not for SEO reasons. He is using it for both tracking click and hiding his affiliate link/url.
These are called internal links, when you link to you one of your domain or subdomain pages. Internal links adds values for SEO as it makes the crawlers aware of those existing pages. There are many options for generating internal links. It depends on your page structure etc. Some of the common options are by using html sitemap like trip advisor's does, using header and footer. For html sitemaps, go to http://www.tripadvisor.com/, scroll all the way bottom to the footer section. There you can sitemap link, which is a path way for many internal links.
Currently BigCommerce does a pretty good job at defining the canonical link for pages. But I am looking to update the behaviour for product list pages and remove the page number out of the link.
Currently it behaves as /category/?page=1, /category/?page2, and so on. I wish to elimate the page number completely and simple use /category
I prefer that search engines view all these pages as a single page as it is just the same data that is indexed from other places.
Currently the page defines the canonical link in the header as:
%%Page.CanonicalLink%%
I am looking to see if anyone has encountered this problem and is looking for a solution.
Thanks
I've developed a service that allows users to search for stores on www.mysite.com.
I also have partners that uses my service. To the user, it looks like they are on my partners web site, when in fact they are on my site. I have only replaced my own header and footer, with my partners header and footer.
For the user, it looks like they are on mysite.partner.com when in reality they are on partner.mysite.com.
If you understood what I tried to explain, my question is:
Will Google and other search engines consider this duplicate content?
Update - canonical page
If I understand canonical pages correctly, www.mysite.com is my canonical page.
So when my partner uses mysite.partner.com?store=wallmart&id=123 which "redirects" (CNAME) to partner.mysite.com?store=wallmart&id=123, my server recognize my sub-domain.
So what I need to do, is to dynamically add the following in my <HEAD> section:
<link rel="canonical" href="mysite.com?store=wallmart&id=123">
Is this correct?
It's duplicate content but there is no penalty as such.
The problem is, for a specific search Google will pick one version of a page and filter out the others from the results. If your partner is targeting the same region then you are in direct competition.
The canonical tag is a way to tell Google which is the official version. If you use it then only the canonical page will show up in search results. So if you canonicalise back to your domain then your partners will be excluded from search results. Only your domains pages will ever show up. Not good for your partners.
There is no win. The only way your partners will do well is if they have their own content or target a different region and you don't do the canonical tag.
So your partners have a chance, I would not add the canonical. Then it's down to the Google gods to decide which of your duplicate pages gets shown.
Definitely. You'll want to use canonical tagging to stop this happening.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394
Yes. It will be considered as duplicate content by Google. Cause you have replaced only footer and header. By recent Google algorithm, content should be unique for website or even blog. If content is not unique, your website will be penalized by Google.
My website has about 200 useful articles. Because the website has an internal search function with lots of parameters, the search engines end up spidering urls with all possible permutations of additional parameters such as tags, search phrases, versions, dates etc. Most of these pages are simply a list of search results with some snippets of the original articles.
According to Google's Webmaster-tools Google spidered only about 150 of the 200 entries in the xml sitemap. It looks as if Google has not yet seen all of the content years after it went online.
I plan to add a few "Disallow:" lines to robots.txt so that the search engines no longer spiders those dynamic urls. In addition I plan to disable some url parameters in the Webmaster-tools "website configuration" --> "url parameter" section.
Will that improve or hurt my current SEO ranking? It will look as if my website is losing thousands of content pages.
This is exactly what canonical URLs are for. If one page (e.g. article) can be reached by more then one URL then you need to specify the primary URL using a canonical URL. This prevents duplicate content issues and tells Google which URL to display in their search results.
So do not block any of your articles and you don't need to enter any parameters, either. Just use canonical URLs and you'll be fine.
As nn4l pointed out, canonical is not a good solution for search pages.
The first thing you should do is have search results pages include a robots meta tag saying noindex. This will help get them removed from your index and let Google focus on your real content. Google should slowly remove them as they get re-crawled.
Other measures:
In GWMT tell Google to ignore all those search parameters. Just a band aid but may help speed up the recovery.
Don't block the search page in the robots.txt file as this will block the robots from crawling and cleanly removing those pages already indexed. Wait till your index is clear before doing a full block like that.
Your search system must be based on links (a tags) or GET based forms and not POST based forms. This is why they got indexed. Switching them to POST based forms should stop robots from trying to index those pages in the first place. JavaScript or AJAX is another way to do it.
Google has been pushing its new canonical link feature, I agree it is really useful. Now instead of having a ton of entry points in to an area you can have one entry.
I was wondering, does this feature play nice with paging?
For example: I have this page which has 8 pages of content, if I specify the canonical of http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/154/iso-always-detected-as-a-movie-when-checking-metadata for the page, will there be any undesired side effects? Will this be better overall? Will this mean that a hit on page 5 will take users to page 1?
When specifying a canonical URL, it should have substantially the same content. Pages 2-8 have different content. Yes, if Google were to honor your canonical link on page 5, it would send users to page 1.
You should use the canonical link on page 1 so that Google knows that http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154 and http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=1&response_type=3 are the same as http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/154/iso-always-detected-as-a-movie-when-checking-metadata
You may also want to put canonical links on the other pages so Google knows that http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=5 is the same as http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=5&response_type=3
You should only add canonical links on pages with identical content. For example, a set of links presented in a different order: sorted by date or alphabetically.
In your case all pages have different content (albeit representing several pages of the same article or conversation thread). Which means you don't need to canonicalize them.
Still if you do, all that happens is that Google gives more priority to the first page, rather than the other pages when displaying them in search results.
Canonical links do not affect your visitors. They only suggest priority and possible duplicate content to bots.
More info from Google here