Add Noindex to Pagination Pages

[MitchellMcKenna]

Add a noindex meta tag to pagination pages so search engines don't index pagination pages like:

• example.com/page/2
• example.com/items/site/twitter.com/page/5
• example.com/items/tag/tech/page/3

[MarcellusMusic]

Can you please explain why we should do this? Can you please give a cohesive tutorial on SEO as it relates to LifePress?

[baileylo]

For pagination pages the ideal solution for example.com/items/site/twitter.com/page/5 would be to have

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/items/site/twitter.com" />

Noindex should prevent the paginated pages themselves from appear on search engines, but the linked content would show up on search engines. You do this to prevent the following from happening -

The search query restricts the site and only shows pages with twitter in the title. As you can see there are several pages with twitter in the title, all of which are pagination pages.

What the noindex, follow directive will do is prevent the pages from showing up in the index, though the pages will still be crawled by Google and their linked content will appear on search engines. The canonical initiative tells Google everything that you index on this page should be linked under the href. You can find more information in this youtube video from google. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm9onOGTgeM&feature=player_embedded

[MitchellMcKenna]

Great explanation of NoIndex,Follow @baileylo.

I'm no expert on the Canonical tag but I've always interpreted it as a way to indicate "here's the link to the original content" to prevent duplicate article content. Doesn't seem like it would pertain to item pagination because the content on each pagination page is constantly changing and not necessarily related to the current first page of the pagination. There's some references in this Quora post: What is the best solution for pagination- rel=canonical or "noindex, follow"?.

[MarcellusMusic]

Thanks! After doing some research, I found that google recommends adding the following:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

I'm now wondering how this may be automatically implemented for each pagination page???

Example of my pagination page: http://www.marcelluslong.com/updates