NoIndex or Rel=Canonical Pagination

[chuck-layton]

Hello,

I had a question about noindex and Rel=Canonical on category page pagination. On my site, the category page the meta="robots" has "Index,Follow" tags and the rel="canonical" is the main category page, but when a user sorts the page the meta="robots" changes to "NoIndex, Follow."

My question is should the sorted page be name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" /> since the  rel="canonical" is pointing to the main page?? Or does it matter that it is NoIndex??

Any thoughts on this topic would be awesome. Thanks.

Main Category Page
https://www.site.com/category/
name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" />
rel="canonical" href="https://www.site.com/category/"/>

Name Sorted Page
https://www.site.com/category/?dir=asc&order=name
name="robots" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW" />
rel="canonical" href="https://www.site.com/category/">

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Chuck,

I would also look into categorizing your URL parameters in this case: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6080550?hl=en as this is inovlving both sorting and categorizing the data on the page it's a good solution to tell Google more about the intent that you have on this page.

Martijn.

[davebuts]

Hi Chuck,

It's strange to me that the "NOINDEX, FOLLOW" would be automatically added to these pages.

The canonical tag is correct so I wouldn't use "noindex" here - it's redundant.

John Mueller from Google recently explained why canonical and "noindex" shouldn't be used together: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-noindex-rel-canonical-confusion-26079.html

Cheers,

David