Are links crawled on canonicalized pages?

[dan1487]

So I have a catalog where all of the paginated pages after page 1 are canonicalized to the first page's URL. Will google still crawl+follow/index the linked-to pages from the pages which I canonicalized? (Basically I don't want google to index page 2, 3, etc, but I DO want it to follow+index the products which I list on them).

[not2easy]

Hi dan1487 and Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

I'm not sure that I understand completely, but here's how I see it - If there is nothing to prevent indexing or crawling or following from one page to the next, then I see no reason why all pages would not be crawled and indexed.

I see that you do not wish pages other than the canonical page to be indexed. You would need to add a meta noindex tag for all pages except the canonical page. Doing that will prevent those pages (and their content) from being indexed. Google does not index the contents of a page without indexing the page. How would that work? Sorry if I'm missing something.

[Robert Charlton]

(Basically I don't want google to index page 2, 3, etc, but I DO want it to follow+index the products which I list on them).

Hi Dan. The canonical tag should only be used if the pages are essentially duplicates. It sounds here like you have content on pages 2, 3, etc that is not on page one. This means that the pages are not duplicates, and you should not be using the canonical tag. Google, btw, lists this as the most common mistake made in the use of the rel=canonical, so you're not alone...

5 common mistakes with rel=canonical
[webmasters.googleblog.com...]

Mistake 1: rel=canonical to the first page of a paginated series
Specifying a rel=canonical from page 2 (or any later page) to page 1 is not correct use of rel=canonical, as these are not duplicate pages. Using rel=canonical in this instance would result in the content on pages 2 and beyond not being indexed at all.

This appears to be a pagination situation where the use of rel="next" and rel="prev" links would be more appropriate. Here's a Google support page on pagination, with a video by Maile Ohye. I suggest reading this over a number of times. It's not immediately intuitive....

Pagination - Google Support
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en [support.google.com]

My emphasis added here, to highlight what it is I think you want to happen...

Use rel="next" and rel="prev" links to indicate the relationship between component URLs. This markup provides a strong hint to Google that you would like us to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page.

There's no way, as far as I know, to absolutely guarantee that the first page will always be returned. As not2easy explains, noindex would basically keep all of the content on a page out of the displayed index, so I don't think it's what you want.

We've got other discussions on pagination and canonicalization, and you might want to check out the topics further in our site search.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld, dan1487!

you should use the "pagination" solution referenced by Robert Charlton since you are describing a "collection/series of documents" situation rather than "duplicate content/non-canonical url" situation.

[EditorialGuy]

There's no way, as far as I know, to absolutely guarantee that the first page will always be returned.

In my experience, it won't (and that's good, since the doughnuts page from your multiple-page article about the history of breakfast pastries might be more relevant to a query on "history of doughnuts").

Personal side note: Our pages that get the most traffic from Google are mostly second or third pages of multiple-page articles.