Canonical links and paging

Question

Google has been pushing its new canonical link feature, I agree it is really useful. Now instead of having a ton of entry points in to an area you can have one entry.

I was wondering, does this feature play nice with paging?

For example: I have this page which has 8 pages of content, if I specify the canonical of http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/154/iso-always-detected-as-a-movie-when-checking-metadata for the page, will there be any undesired side effects? Will this be better overall? Will this mean that a hit on page 5 will take users to page 1?

Stenotypy

Answer 1

When specifying a canonical URL, it should have substantially the same content. Pages 2-8 have different content. Yes, if Google were to honor your canonical link on page 5, it would send users to page 1.

You should use the canonical link on page 1 so that Google knows that http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154 and http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=1&response_type=3 are the same as http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/154/iso-always-detected-as-a-movie-when-checking-metadata

You may also want to put canonical links on the other pages so Google knows that http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=5 is the same as http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=5&response_type=3

Dinky

Answer 2

You should only add canonical links on pages with identical content. For example, a set of links presented in a different order: sorted by date or alphabetically.

In your case all pages have different content (albeit representing several pages of the same article or conversation thread). Which means you don't need to canonicalize them.

Still if you do, all that happens is that Google gives more priority to the first page, rather than the other pages when displaying them in search results.

Canonical links do not affect your visitors. They only suggest priority and possible duplicate content to bots.

More info from Google here

Okra