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.
Why is "Noindex" better than a "Canonical" for Pagination?
-
"Noindex" is a suggested pagination technique here: http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284, and everyone seems to agree that you shouldn't canonicalize all pages in a series to the first page, but I'd love if someone can explain why "noindex" is better than a canonical?
-
I guess the short answer is that Google frowns on this practice, since the pages aren't really duplicates. Since they frown on it, they may choose to simply ignore the canonical, and you'll be left with the problem. I think the general problem is that this requires a lot of extra crawling/processing on their part, so it's not that it's "black at" - it's just a pain for them.
I've typically found putting a NOINDEX on pages 2+ is more effective, even in 2014. That said, I do think rel=prev/next has become a viable option, especially if your site isn't high risk for duplicates. Rel=prev/next can, in theory, allow Google to rank any page in the series, without the negative effects of the near-duplicates.
Keep in mind that you can combine rel=prev/next and rel=canonical if you're using sorts/filters/etc. Google does support the use of rel=canonical for variants of the same search page. It gets pretty confusing and the simple truth is that they've made some mixed statements that seem to change over time.
-
The best part of adding the noindex tag is hiding the pagination pages from the search engine's search index, which will make only the highest quality pages available in the search results. This gives a signal of your website being a better one with good content. The CTR rate will be higher too.
-
Hi,
I would like to address the following part of your original query without even going to the article that you referred to:
"everyone seems to agree that you shouldn't canonicalize all pages in a series to the first page"
The reason for this is, if you canonicalize all the pages in a series to the first page, you are giving a hint to Google that only the first page is what you are concerned of and it should be indexed. With this, all the non-canonical pages will be taken out from the index which you would not want to happen especially when the content of these pages is unique.
So depending on your requirement you can opt for either a 'view all method' or 'rel=prev/next' method for your pagination requirements.
Good luck.
Best,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
How to handle sorting, filtering, and pagination in ecommerce? Canonical is enough?
Hello, after reading various articles and watching several videos I'm still not sure how to handle faceted navigation (sorting/filtering) and pagination on my ecommerce site. Current indexation status: The number of "real" pages (from my sitemap) - 2.000 pages Google Search Console (Valid) - 8.000 pages Google Search Console (Excluded) - 44.000 pages Additional info: Vast majority of those 50k additional pages (44 + 8 - 2) are pages created by sorting, filtering and pagination. Example of how the URL changes while applying filters/sorting: example.com/category --> example.com/category/1/default/1/pricefrom/100 Every additional page is canonicalized properly, yet as you can see 6k is still indexed. When I enter site:example.com/category in Google it returns at least several results (in most of the cases the main page is on the 1st position). In Google Analytics I can see than ~1.5% of Google traffic comes to the sorted/filtered pages. The number of pages indexed daily (from GSC stats) - 3.000 And so I have a few questions: Is it ok to have those additional pages indexed or will the "real" pages rank higher if those additional would not be indexed? If it's better not to have them indexed should I add "noindex" to sorting/filtering links or add eg. Disallow: /default/ in robots.txt? Or perhaps add "noindex, nofollow" to the links? Google would have then 50k pages less to crawl but perhaps it'd somehow impact my rankings in a negative way? As sorting/filtering is not based on URL parameters I can't add it in GSC. Is there another way of doing that for this filtering/sorting url structure? Thanks in advance, Andrew
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thpchlk0 -
Are "Powered By..." type footer backlinks good or bad for SEO?
Hi guys, We're running a software company which is also selling WP themes amongst other things. We've heard recently that footer backlinks like "Powered by BigBangThemes" might do more harm than good. Some clients usually forget to change them - so we want to make sure we stop including them in case this is true. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andy.bigbangthemes0 -
Should I Keep adding 301s or use a noindex,follow/canonical or a 404 in this situation?
Hi Mozzers, I feel I am facing a double edge sword situation. I am in the process of migrating 4 domains into one. I am in the process of creating URL redirect mapping The pages I am having the most issues are the event pages that are past due but carry some value as they generally have one external followed link. www.example.com/event-2008 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016 www.example.com/event-2007 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016 www.example.com/event-2006 301 redirect to www.newdomain.com/event-2016 Again these old events aren't necessarily important in terms of link equity but do carry some and at the same time keep adding multiple 301s pointing to the same page may not be a good ideas as it will increase the page speed load time which will affect the new site's performance. If i add a 404 I will lose the bit of equity in those. No index,follow may work since it won't index the old domain nor the page itself but still not 100% sure about it. I am not sure how a canonical would work since it would keep the old domain live. At this point I am not sure which direction I should follow? Thanks for your answers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
"sex" in non-adult domain name
I have a client with a domain that has "sex" in the domain name. For example, electronicsexpo.com. The domain ranks for a few keywords related to the services offered. It is an old domain that has been online for over 10 years. It ranks well for local keywords. No real SEO effort has been made on this domain, so it is rather a clean slate. I am going to be doing SEO on this site. Will the fact that the word "sex" exists in the name have any sort of negative consequence. There is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING adult related or pornographic on this site. I would think that search engines are sophisticated enough to differentiate, but would potential customers with things like parental filters be blocked from viewing content? Is this hurtful in anyway? If so, would I be better off changing domain names? TIA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
When i search for my domain name - google asks "did you mean" - why?
Hi all, I just noticed something quite odd - if i do a search for my domain name (see: http://goo.gl/LBc1lz) google shows my domain as first result, but it also asks "did i mean" and names another website with very similar name. the other site has far lower PA/DA according to Moz, any ideas why google is doing this? and more inportantly how i could stop it? please advise James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Should pages with rel="canonical" be put in a sitemap?
I am working on an ecommerce site and I am going to add different views to the category pages. The views will all have different urls so I would like to add the rel="canonical" tag to them. Should I still add these pages to the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
"noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages
Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Noindex, Nofollow to previous domain
Hi, My programmer recently did a horrible mistkae by adding noindex, nofollow to our website without me noticing for two days. At the same time he did it we bought a new domain and redirected the old domain to the new domain: The Old domain is: http://www.websitebuildersworld.com and the new one is: http://www.websiteplanet.com Now unfortunatly I didn't notice the noindex,nofollow when it was on the old domain and I redirected it to websiteplanet.com before I fixed the noindex, nofollow. I fixed the problem around 10 hours ago on the new domain (www.websiteplanet.com) but the old domain didn't get indexed back (yet), so for example if you search for WebsiteBuildersWorld in google you will not reach the homepage as google deleted it because of the noindex,nofollow. My question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ouzan
Do you think that it will be fixed and google will retrieve websitebuildersworld homepage to his search results and then redirect it to websiteplanet? Or because I redirected websitebuildersworld.com to websiteplanet.com before letting google crawling websitebuildersworld.com without the noindex,no follow it wouldn't get indexed again? I hope I explained the problem good enough. Looking forward for your valuable replies. Thanks.0