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.
Paginated Pages Which Shouldnt' Exist..
-
Hi
I have paginated pages on a crawl which shouldn't be paginated:
https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs
My crawl shows:
<colgroup><col width="377"></colgroup>
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=2 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=3 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=4 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=5 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=6 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=7 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=8 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=9 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=10 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=11 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=12 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=13 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=14 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=15 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=16 |
| https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=17 |Where is this coming from?
Thank you
-
You will also have to get those URLs out of the index once you fix the rel next/prev issue. In order to do that effectively, they should return a 404 or 410 status code in the HTTP header so Google knows that they no longer exist (even though they never really did in the first place). Otherwise, it's what is known as a "soft 404" in which the page doesn't really exist, but returns a 200 (OK) status code, which is confusing to Google if you don't want them indexed.
-
Hi Becky
I can see chairs:
https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs
But the paginated versions above are not in there. (can you see them?)
All you need to do is remove this directive for pages without a page 2: rel="next" href="https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=2" > as there is no page 2 for chairs.
Regards
Nigel
-
Hi Nigel
Thanks for jumping in. I'm confused as I have found the pages on my screaming frog crawl?
This page https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs shouldn't have any pagination as there are no additional pages, but there is rel=next in the source code...
Now I'm a bit confused!
Becky
-
Yes I've just gone through every top level page too & pagination is awful, so I'm compiling a list and a case to push it.
It's pretty bad across the site, so I'll push for this to be updated. I find new issues with it all the time..
Thanks for your help!
-
Yes exactly. Even though the pages don't exist to the user, they still technically exist. If I were you, I'd take a very deep look at pagination on your site. If this is happening at scale, then fixing it could be a major improvement to your site. I took a look and it seems to be happening on all your top-level category pages like Chairs, Office Furniture, Shelving & Racking, etc.
These paginated pages are essentially a bunch of duplicate pages of your main category pages, each with a self-referencing canonical (which is the proper way to set up pagination). So Google could be extremely confused about which one to rank. In most cases, Google will rank page 1 because the use of rel="next"/rel="prev" is essentially telling Google that page 1 is the canonical version. However, you're still opening yourself up to the possibility of Google crawling all of these duplicate pages which is a huge waste on your crawl budget.
Hope that helps!
-
Hi
Thank you both.
We do have issues with our pagination which I've raised with developers, but it's taking forever to sort out. I'll flag this as well.
So even though the content on the paginated pages for Chairs doesn't exist we still need to remove the tags on these - https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs?page=10
-
If you view your source code, you'll notice you are actually using rel="next" and rel="prev" on the main category page (https://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs). This is why you (and most likely Googlebot as well) are crawling these paginated pages. Even though you don't have links to the paginated pages on the main category page, they still exist and you're giving crawlers the directive (rel next / rel prev) to crawl them.
If you remove rel="next" on the category home page, that should help but you should really remove rel="next" and rel="prev" on the paginated pages as well. Unless you do that, Google will still find them and crawl them because they're aware these pages exist and they're likely indexed.
Here's a great resource on understanding pagination as well as the correct use of rel="next" and rel="prev" from Maile Ohye at Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njn8uXTWiGg
Hope this helps!
Cheers!
-Tyler -
Nice website by the way. It looks very professional. And your 49 DA is very impressive.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
Should you 'noindex' Checkout Pages?
Today I was reviewing my Moz analytics and suddenly noticed 1,000 issues with pages without a meta description. I reviewed the list and learned it is 1,000 checkout pages. That's because my website has thousands of agency pages from which you can buy a product, and it reflects that difference on each version of the checkout. So, I was thinking about no-indexing (but continuing to 'follow') these checkout pages, but wondering if it has any knock-on effects I may be unaware of? Any assistance is much appreciated. Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Luke_Proctor0 -
Is it ok to repeat a (focus) keyword used on a previous page, on a new page?
I am cataloguing the pages on our website in terms of which focus keyword has been used with the page. I've noticed that some pages repeated the same keyword / term. I've heard that it's not really good practice, as it's like telling google conflicting information, as the pages with the same keywords will be competing against each other. Is this correct information? If so, is the alternative to use various long-winded keywords instead? If not, meaning it's ok to repeat the keyword on different pages, is there a maximum recommended number of times that we want to repeat the word? Still new-ish to SEO, so any help is much appreciated! V.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Vitzz1 -
Changed all external links to 'NoFollow' to fix manual action penalty. How do we get back?
I have a blog that received a Webmaster Tools message about a guidelines violation because of "unnatural outbound links" back in August. We added a plugin to make all external links 'NoFollow' links and Google removed the penalty fairly quickly. My question, how do we start changing links to 'follow' again? Or at least being able to add 'follow' links in posts going forward? I'm confused by the penalty because the blog has literally never done anything SEO-related, they have done everything via social and email. I only started working with them recently to help with their organic presence. We don't want them to hurt themselves at all, but 'follow' links are more NATURAL than having everything as 'NoFollow' links, and it helps with their own SEO by having clean external 'follow' links. Not sure if there is a perfect answer to this question because it is Google we're dealing with here, but I'm hoping someone else has some tips that I may not have thought about. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagJeff0 -
What are best page titles for sub-domain pages?
Hi Moz communtity, Let's say a website has multiple sub-domains with hundreds and thousands of pages. Generally we will be mentioning "primary keyword & "brand name" on every page of website. Can we do same on all pages of sub-domains to increase the authority of website for this primary keyword in Google? Or it gonna end up as negative impact if Google consider as duplicate content being mentioned same keyword and brand name on every page even on website and all pages of sub domains? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Is Google able to see child pages in our AJAX pagination?
We upgraded our site to a new platform the first week of August. The product listing pages have a canonical issue. Page 2 of the paginated series has a canonical pointing to page 1 of the series. Google lists this as a "mistake" and we're planning on implementing best practice (https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html) We want to implement rel=next,prev. The URLs are constructed using a hashtag and a string of query parameters. You'll notice that these parameters are ¶meter:value vs ¶meter=value. /products#facet:&productBeginIndex:0&orderBy:&pageView:grid&minPrice:&maxPrice:&pageSize:& None of the URLs are included in any indexed URLs because the canonical is the page URL without the AJAX parameters. So these results are expected. Screamingfrog only finds the product links on page 1 and doesn't move to page 2. The link to page 2 is AJAX. ScreamingFrog only crawls AJAX if its in Google's deprecated recommendations as far as I know. The "facet" parameter is noted in search console, but the example URLs are for an unrelated URL that uses the "?facet=" format. None of the other parameters have been added by Google to the console. Other unrelated parameters from the new site are in the console. When using the fetch as Google tool, Google ignores everything after the "#" and shows only the main URL. I tested to see if it was just pulling the canonical of the page for the test, but that was not the case. None of the "#facet" strings appear in the Moz crawl I don't think Google is reading the "productBeginIndex" to specify the start of a page 2 and so on. One thought is to add the parameter in search console, remove the canonical, and test one category to see how Google treats the pages. Making the URLs SEO friendly (/page2.../page3) is a heavy lift. Any ideas how to diagnose/solve this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jason.Capshaw0 -
Soft 404's from pages blocked by robots.txt -- cause for concern?
We're seeing soft 404 errors appear in our google webmaster tools section on pages that are blocked by robots.txt (our search result pages). Should we be concerned? Is there anything we can do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline4 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0