On Oct 24, 5:39 pm, euromark <[email protected]> wrote: > this site states pretty clearly on how to use > canonicalhttp://www.johnfdoherty.com/do-bing-and-google-treat-relcanonical-dif... > > " > When should I definitely NOT use the canonical tag? > A few times exist when you should not use the canonical tag, and > instead use a different tactic: > > On paginated results (use rel=prev or rel=next instead > When the page is no longer necessary. Use a 301 redirect to a relevant > page instead. > " > > Currently we use "canonical"=>url without any named params. > But this seems to be the quick and dirty hack. > > The problem is that "page" is mixed in with "sort" etc > For "sort" we should use canonical. > There can be quite a few combinations of the above params... > > How do you handle this? > Extract the page and display the canonical link in combination with > this single param if available? > > I think it is pretty important to get this right because otherwise > everything after page 1 does not get indexed.
I would say the absolute most important thing to keep in mind when thinking about SEO is: is this page (not the things it links to) important to search engines; if it's a choice do I want this page showing up in search results instead of <other pages>? In context that means is the list itself important or, if appropriate, the individual item pages? You are not going to prevent links on your paginated lists from being followed and indexed by putting a canonical meta tag pointing at page 1 of your list pages. If you are paginating /foos/index and each item has a link to /foos/view/<id>, you really want search engines to index the individual foos (probably), not the list which is just a means to find them. This is where using a canonical on the list pages to point at page 1 makes sense -especially if the listing is constantly changing; It is a simple tactic to prevent search engines indexing pages that are SEO-irrelevant, whilst not preventing them from finding all the individual items, and ensuring that any links that point to page >1 still give SEO-value to your site. If there is no /foos/view/<id> then the information you've found regarding - rel=prev and rel=next and don't use canonical - is a lot more relevant, but personally I canonical => page 1, the list pages as they are no where near as important as the things they link to, and do not consider it a dirty hack to do so. AD -- Our newest site for the community: CakePHP Video Tutorials http://tv.cakephp.org Check out the new CakePHP Questions site http://ask.cakephp.org and help others with their CakePHP related questions. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php
