Use of rel canonical on paginated results?

[setzer]

I'm wondering if it's acceptable to use rel canonical on paginated pages, so that they point to a central location?

I checked Matt Cutt's blog and this is what he seems to be doing. Check source of www.mattcutts.com/blog/page/23/ for example, there's a canonical tag that points to the home page (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/).

However, I read that Google ignores canonical tags if the page content differs too much, so maybe there's no benefit to this at all. Thoughts?

[aakk9999]

I personally would not, I would prefer noindex,follow for paginated results.

But it also depends whether the items being paginated can be accessed easily from elsewhere, in which case you may just stop other paginated pages in robots.txt (for example pagination for search/sort/filter etc).

[deadsea]

Google specifically said not to use rel canonical for pagination. Instead, you should used rel next and rel prev to let Googlebot know that the pages are in a series. Google would also like you to implement a "view all" page. Here is the video they produced with this advice:

[youtube.com...]

[menntarra 34]

I have to add that if you have tons of pages then a "view all" is NOT recommended at all. Whatsmore (it is in the video as well) if the "view all" pageload time takes let's say more than 10 secs, then it is not recommended.

An other thing is if your site has a search function and you have a pagination, then again i'm not sure which one to use: canonical or prev-next ?

@deadsea: What do you think is it wise to do the following:
on page two there would be a <link rel="prev" href="/1", is it not wiser to redirect that straight to: href="/" instead of first page from a SEO point of view? (of course both are the same pages)

And to follow that, what if i have a lot of related articles about the same topic and i want to connect them to one another can i connect them(they can be described as a "SERIES") with this prev-next stuff even if they have totally different urls?

[aakk9999]

<link rel="prev" href="/1"

If your canonical page is domain root, then the link rel "prev" should point to root, not to "/1".

if your site has a search function and you have a pagination, then again i'm not sure which one to use: canonical or prev-next

It would be perhaps the best to stop the search URLs via robots.txt. Of course, providing that there are other ways of accessing the product pages.

[tedster]

This is an area where I never quite understood Matt's advice - and I've noticed him give it several times. I've had solid results by using rel="next" etc, and that seems to me to make more sense than twisting rel="canonical" into a rather peculiar application. It may well be something Google can make good use of, however that doesn't make it standard in any way, and I also care about Bing ;)

[setzer]

This is an area where I never quite understood Matt's advice - and I've noticed him give it several times. I've had solid results by using rel="next" etc, and that seems to me to make more sense than twisting rel="canonical" into a rather peculiar application. It may well be something Google can make good use of, however that doesn't make it standard in any way, and I also care about Bing ;)

Yeah, I'm going to start adding the next and prev tags, that makes more sense.

[g1smd]

Use

rel="canonical"

to point to pages with the same content, or a page which is a superset of the content, not to a different part of the content.

Read this very carefully: [tools.ietf.org...] [RFC6596]

[klark0]

^^ mattcutts tweeted that link today. did you get it from him or was it the other way around, mmmm.