Tongue twister, anyone?  Pagination canonicalization is one of the trickier challenges for the technical SEO set today.  We’ve been closely monitoring the hints and tips that occasionally drop from our favorite Googlers’ lips (sure, we all adore Matt Cutts, but let’s save a little love for JohnMu and Maile Ohye, shall we?).  Here’s a roundup of good advice we’ve heard, along with our analysis and resulting recommendations.

Pagination is commonly seen on ecommerce sites when a category contains more products than can be listed on each page:

The question often arises:  How should an SEO handle all of these pages?  Allowing all of these pages to be indexed separately in search engines means indexing a lot of duplicate or near-duplicate content on a website, which dilutes SEO power and creates an undesirable user experience, since nobody particularly wants to click through from Google to a deep paginated page.

Here is the wisdom we’ve gathered from our favorite Googlers on the subject:

JohnMu on paginated pages and the canonical tag (Feb, 2010):

Pagination: this is complicated, I personally would be careful when using with rel=canonical with paginated lists. The important part is that we should be able to find all products listed, so at the very least those lists should provide a default sort order where we can access (and index) all pages. Since this is somewhat difficult unless you really, really know what you are doing, I would personally avoid adding rel=canonical for these pages. One possible solution could be to use JavaScript for paginated lists with different sort orders, for example, that way you would have a single URL which lists all products.

Our interpretation: Google needs to be able to see all of these paginated pages so that it can click through and get to all the individual links (product pages) that are listed on all the pages.  JohnMu suggests creating a default page that contains all of the links, so that Google can get to them.   Trouble is, what if you have a thousand of these links?  Or even more.

At SMX West (March 2011), Maile Ohye noted that you shouldn’t use canonical tags for paginated pages. (We’ve heard her say this since 2010) Here are notes from Barry Schwartz (SEORoundtable) on this session:

Maile explained that since the results on pages 2, 3, 4, and 5 are different from page 1, you should not use the canonical tag here.
Not only that, if you do, Google may ignore it because Google uses methods to determine if the canonical tag command is actually something valid for that case. So if you canonical page 2 to page 1 and page 2 is not similar enough to page 1, Google may ignore your canonical tag.

Our interpretation:  Since paginated pages aren’t identical to each other, and they aren’t subsets of each other, they shouldn’t be canonicalized to each other.  Google is pretty smart and can probably figure out when it’s dealing with page=1, page=2, page=3, and Google may ignore your canonical tags in this case.

The one exception to the no canonical tags for pagination rule is when you have a “view all” page.  As Brian Ussery of SEO firm Nine by Blue notes:

If paginated content uses “view all” page if it loads well you can put rel canonical on those URLs.
If you don’t have a “view all” page 2 isn’t a subset so you can’t use rel canonical.

At the end of the day, our two favored pagination approaches are the following:

• noindex,follow
  Place a robots meta tag on all deep paginated pages instructing the robots to “noindex, follow” the page.  This will allow Google to visit the deep pages, follow links on these pages, but not index these pages.
  
• “view all” + canonical
  Create a “view all” page showing all of the links on your list.  Then, on all other paginated pages (including page 1), add a canonical tag identifying the “view all” page as the canonical form.   We think this solution is best used when the “view all” page is also the version of the page that is linked from elsewhere on the site.

UPDATE:  Google got its act together and created a better way to deal with pagination canonicalization.  Read all about it at Google’s webmaster blog.

You built it, but did they come? If you’ve ever wondered how to get listed in the major search engines’ shopping sites, these links will help you.

Google

Search Google Products, Google’s shopping engine, here: http://www.google.com/products.

If you’d like to sell something on Google Products, you can do so for free. You’ll need to set up a product feed, which is basically a list of all of your products, along with important info like price, URL, thumbnail image and UPC code.

Get started here: http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/products/howitworks.html

Yahoo

Search Yahoo! shopping here: http://shopping.yahoo.com/

To list your products, you have some choices:

• You can set up your own Yahoo! store through Yahoo! Merchant Solutions. There are three levels available to you, each with varying levels of fees for setup, hosting, and transactions. Learn about it and sign up here: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/shopsb/index.php
• Or, you can have your products fed to Yahoo Shopping via Pricegrabber. (typically a pay-per-click fee applies).

Bing

Bing offers a shopping feed similar to Google’s, but with a more difficult-to-understand process for setting it up.  Get started here:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising/bing-shopping

Independent shopping portals: Shopzilla, Bizrate.com, Shopping.com, Nextag.com, Pricegrabber

These independent shopping sites offer many shopping amenities and a user experience that is comparable to – or better than – the larger services. Their market share is often larger than Google, Yahoo! Search, or Bing. For much more information and details about independent shopping sites, see SearchEngineLand: Kicking The Tires on Shopping Search, Part II.

If you’re building a new site or redesigning one, we think you should switch to meaningful, human readable (aka “semantic”) URLs.  But don’t do it just because we think you should.  Do it because the research backs us up.

If you’re launching a new website, or getting started on a redesign that will require changes to your page URLs, you may be considering the benefits of human-readable, semantic URLs.  We are proponents of these URLs, which we think make good common sense.  But if you need more than common sense to justify an increased level of effort for implementing human-readable URLs, here’s some hard data to back it up:

Semantic URLs Help Search Engine Ranks

• The consensus in the SEO industry is that keywords in page URLs are a factor in Google’s ranking algorithm. In our experience, sitewide semantic URLs gives a modest, across-the-boards ranking lift. Don’t expect to jump from third page to #1; but a lift from #11 to #6 is feasible.
• Page URLs are sometimes used as the linking text from other websites; this translates into more keywords in the linking text pointing to your site, which plays a role in the ranking algorithm
• Google’s Matt Cutts has confirmed that it is helpful to have keywords in the URL – as long as it’s done in a sensible way. (See http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-keywords-in-the-url-16976)

Semantic URLs Increase Clickthrough Rates

Not only can human-readable, meaningful, keyword-rich URLs improve search rankings, they may increase your clickthrough rates.  Here are salient research highlights:

• In one eye-tracking study, business professionals viewing a search engine listing with a long URL ended up clicking on the URL immediately after it 2.5 times as often as those viewing a short URL. (1)
• In another eye-tracking study, when searchers scan through search engine listings, 13-33% of time is spent looking at URLs. (2)
• In yet another eye-tracking study, searchers spend 30% of their time reading the listing title, 43% of the time reading the listing description, and 21% of their time reading the URL. (3)
• There was “overwhelming endorsement”  when participants where asked the question: “When I’m searching the Web, I often look at the URL of each search result to help me decide if the page will be useful.” (on a 7-point scale, 6.4 was the average).  (2)

There are, of course, a few caveats on the effect of semantic URLs on clickthrough rates:

• The effect is greater for navigational searches, and lower for informational searches.  Navigational searches are people who already know exactly what they are looking for (for example, they might type “flickr.com” into the Google search box), and they are probably most interested in your domain name, not so much the individual filenames.
• The effect may be diminished if Google is showing breadcrumbs, rather than a URL, in your site snippets.

We’re pleased that common sense and scientific research are in alignment on semantic URLs. We typically would not recommend changing page URLs for the sole purpose of SEO improvements, but if you’re making changes to your website anyway, we hope you’ll take advantage of this rare SEO “no brainer.”

FOOTNOTES

(1) Marketing Sherpa (2008).  Search Marketing Benchmark Guide for 2008 (www.marketingsherpa.com/exs/Search08Excerpt.pdf)

(2) Cutrell, E., & Guan, Z. (2007). Eye tracking in MSN Search: Investigating snippet length, target position and task types (research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=70395)

(3) Granka, L., Joachims, T., & Gay, G. (2004). Eye-tracking analysis of user behavior in WWW search. Proceedings of the 27th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (pp. 478-479). New York: ACM Press. (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/tj/publications/granka_etal_04a.pdf)