6 replies to this topic

[shimlad]

Ok so i know if your website produces different pages basically showing the same information your suppose to use the canonical url tag.

for example

www.example.com/shop/dress/
www.example.com/shop/dress/black
www.example.com/shop/dress/white
www.example.com/shop/dress/purple

it would be good practice to use the tag on the black, white and purple pages above linking back to the www.example.com/shop/dress/ page.

However, what about when you are displaying results of hotels in area A and the results go onto multiple pages.

for example

www.example.com/area/hotels
www.example.com/area/hotels/2
www.example.com/area/hotels/3
www.example.com/area/hotels/4

The results on page 2, 3 and 4 are different to /area/hotels because they are showing different hotels, however they still have the same title tag, h1 heading, and a few other bits of similar content.

Hence i am not sure if pages 2,3 and 4 although similar, if they are similar enough to link back to the /area/hotels page.

any ideas?

[Ron Carnell]

According to Google's Maile Ohye, at the recent SMX Advanced conference: No, that would be an improper use of the Rel=Canonical tag.

See http://searchenginel...eal-world-81204 for additional information.

[qwerty]

The subject matter of pages 2, 3 and on will be more or less the same as that of the first place (hotels in a particular area), but the content will be different. If the list of hotels on page 2 was the same as the list on page 1, you wouldn't need to publish a second page.

You only need to use the canonical tag if you're concerned that what's on all of those pages is similar enough that a search engine isn't going to want to index all of it. But if you announce page 1 as canonical by putting the tag on all the other pages, you'll basically be telling search engines that you don't believe there's valuable, unique content anywhere but page 1.

I think your only problem here is in coming up with unique titles for each of the pages in question, and that might be as simple as tacking a page number onto the title. You do want to make sure each page has a unique title and meta description (I don't think Google would go to the trouble of pointing out duplicates in Webmaster Tools if it didn't matter).

If it was absolutely necessary (and I really doubt it will be), I'd say your best bet would be to create a page that lists all of the hotels for a given area and make that canonical while offering readers the option of multiple pages with a set number of listings on each.

[Jill]

What Ron said. Maile recommends canonicalizing the additional pages to one long "view all" page, which makes a lot of sense to me.

[shimlad]

Ok thanks guys that is cleared it up.

I don't think i will create one huge view all page as it would be too slow to load and not a very good user experience.

Plus we already have the ability for users to select how many listing they want to appear on the page.

Seems like that would be creating a page for search engines rather than for users, which is exactly what ive always been told not to do

Looks like i am stuck with indexing page 2,3,4 until Google come up with a new pagination tag.

[qwerty]

Plus we already have the ability for users to select how many listing they want to appear on the page.

Now that is a potential, albeit small canonicalization issue. Say the default is 10 listings per page, and G indexes pages 1 and 2. If you offer the option of 20 listings per page, then the first page is going to display the content that Google has already seen on the first two default pages.

I don't expect this to cause you any problems, though. Google's just going to ignore the versions of the pages that show more than the default. But if you happen to be using a JS dropdown to give users the choice of how many results per page they want to see, odds are Google won't even request the alternate versions of the pages. And if you're using some parameter in the URLs of the alternate pages (hotels/2&results=20, for example) you can go to Webmaster Tools and instruct G to ignore any URL containing that parameter or block it in robots.txt.

[shimlad]

Hi qwerty, the site allows users to change the number of results per page without changing the URL or adding parameters, don't know how it does it, but i means it doesn't said G lots of different versions of the same page