Canonical and duplicate content from pagination

[danwhitehouse]

Hi All,
I work for a recruitment agency and we have about 30 website with around 40,000 pages per site.

Over the last few weeks we have been trying to address our pagination issues. We have jobs for various industries and so on and multiple pages for the job feeds. For example /industry /industry/p1 /industry/p2 and so on. Each one of these pages are identical apart from the job feeds that are the main content for the site.

So may are canabalising keywords in all meta data, title and so on and increasingly finding it hard for the authority version of the page to rank well even with a good page authority.

So to combat the duplicate content issues we've discussed the following:

- canonical tag
- adding page 1, page 2 to the title tags for pages
- using # in URLs
- Using ? in URLs
- add noindex to subsequent pages

So what we're trying to achieve is to keep our jobs feeds / pages indexed. Tell Google that we're not duplicating content.

Could really do with a bit of advise on this one please guys. It can effect the rankings dramatically for our range of sites if we do this correctly or incorrectly.

Thanks in advance!

Dan

[tedster]

Hello danwhitehouse - and welcome to the forums.

The canonical approach on its own may do what you hope. I've seen a number of successful implementations of this - making page 1 the canonical for all higher pages. Adding in noindex (follow) may also be helpful as a backstop in case something goes south.

Adding 'Page 2" to the title (or even beginning with "2.") is a helpful thing for users, but probably won't turn the tide all on its own.

Switching to "#" for deeper pagination URLs would certainly stop indexing - zt least the way things are right now. But I've seen so many issues around hash and hash-bang implementation that I hesitate to suggest it.

I also would avoid introducing query strings [?] if you are not already using them. Again, there's too much potential for chaos here, especially when the canonical link alone would most likely serve.

[danwhitehouse]

Hi Ted,
Thanks for your reply. Very interesting info. What were trying to do is keep the subsequent pages indexed (plus the jobs on each page) but keep Google happy without causing any duplicate content issues.

I feel that the canonical tag may be the easiest to implement, but if our pages drop out of Google's index, then we can't afford to do that.

It's a tricky one as the long term solution would be to rewrite the URLs with dynamic pages, but we have not got the time to do that at the moment.

So what would you go for?

Thanks

[deadsea]

I would suggest reading this recent thread which is also about pagination:
Canonical URL tags and INDEX on Pagination? [webmasterworld.com]

I've had good success removing pagination entirely. Users don't typically use it. It doesn't do a great job of passing pagerank. It doesn't allow you to rank multiple times for the same or similar keywords.

On the other hand, I've never seen bad pagination kill off search engine referrals. At the worst it seems to make googlebot do a lot of unneeded crawling.

[Planet13]

I would echo deadsea's comments;

I've had good success removing pagination entirely. Users don't typically use it. It doesn't do a great job of passing pagerank. It doesn't allow you to rank multiple times for the same or similar keywords.

If you can eliminate pagination altogether (by making more specific category and subcategory pages) then that would probably be best.

I don't know if that is going to work for your situation, but I have found it more than worthwhile for the amount of time required to do it.

[danwhitehouse]

Thanks guys, really appreciate it. I'm pretty sure that my employers would be looking for a quick fix so it may have to be a canonical tag or a quick alternative. I'm not even sure how we would remove pagination. Do you mean just remove the internal linking 1,2,3 etc from each page?

Thanks again

[deadsea]

Remove the linking and 301 pages 2+ back to page 1.

The other thread I pointed you to has my post with the metrics I try to use before removing paginition to ensure that it won't hurt. Pulling that data is the hard part, implementing the removal is pretty easy. Maybe A little harder than a canonical tag, but not much.

[danwhitehouse]

Hi Deadsea,
Do you mind dropping me a message of your site so I can take a look at what you did?

Thanks