Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Category URL Pagination where URLs don't change between pages
-
Hello,
I am working on an e-commerce site where there are categories with multiple pages. In order to avoid pagination issues I was thinking of using rel=next and rel=prev and cannonical tags. I noticed a site where the URL doesn't change between pages, so whether you're on page 1,2, or 3 of the same category, the URL doesn't change. Would this be a cleaner way of dealing with pagination?
-
Thank you, Oleg, for your response, and thanks, Matt, for jumping in.
The response was definitely very informative, but I'm still on the fence about this issue because, while Oleg confirmed what I had thought, that #2 would be the better choice, I now want to ensure that all the products on pages past page 1 will be crawlable by search engines. Any scenarios that you can think of in which search engines would not be able to read subsequent pages? Assuming that this is done using Ajax should we be okay?
(Please bear with me, my specialty is link building and content, not the technical stuff
-
To add some info... if you want infinite scrolling + paginated pages, check out Google's demo.
-
Hi Michelle!
Did Oleg settle this for you?
-
use #2 if search engines can see the content that would be on the other pages. if they can't see it, then use rel=next/prev
-
Thank you! Just to clarify, this is a site that is being built from scratch so my question really is, what would be the best way to go about this?
-
use rel=next/prev and cannonical tags if necessary
-
ensuring that the URL doesn't change between pages 1,2, and 3 within the category
-
-
If the paginated pages still exist (and can be indexed) but you want to load more products dynamically, without changing the URL, using rel=next/prev would work fine.
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
-
Duplicate Page Titles For Paginated Topics In Blog
Hello, I've just run a site audit and it has come up with a duplicate title tag issue for the topics section of our blog. For example it is flagging that the following have the same page title. https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name/page/2 How significant is this as an SEO issue and what are the ways we can go about fixing this? I look forward to any suggestions and guidance that can be provided. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | SEOCT1 -
My old URL's are still indexing when I have redirected all of them, why is this happening?
I have built a new website and have redirected all my old URL's to their new ones but for some reason Google is still indexing the old URL's. Also, the page authority for all of my pages has dropped to 1 (apart from the homepage) but before they were between 12 to 15. Can anyone help me with this?
Technical SEO | | One2OneDigital0 -
Are image pages considered 'thin' content pages?
I am currently doing a site audit. The total number of pages on the website are around 400... 187 of them are image pages and coming up as 'zero' word count in Screaming Frog report. I needed to know if they will be considered 'thin' content by search engines? Should I include them as an issue? An answer would be most appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
The word 'shop' in a page title
I'm reworking most of the page titles on our site and I'm considering the use of the word 'Shop' before a product category. ex. Shop 'keyword' | Brand Name As opposed to just using the keyword sans 'Shop.' Some of the keywords are very generic, especially for a top level category page. Question: Is the word 'Shop' damaging my SEO efforts in any way?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
Best URL format for pagination
We're currently changing the URL format of our website search, we have been discussing a lot and cannot decide the past way to pass the pagination parameter for SEO. We narrowed down to the options. www.website.com/apples/p2 - www.website.com/apples?page=2 - www.website.com/apples/page/2 What would give us best ranking returns? What do you think?
Technical SEO | | HelpSaude0 -
How do I get Google to display categories instead of the URL in results?
I've seen that for some domains Google will show a nice clickable site heirarchy in place of the actual URL of a search result. See attached for an example. How do I go about achieving this type of results? categorized.png
Technical SEO | | Carlito-2569610