Duplicate Content Issues with Pagination

[znotes]

Hi Moz Community,

We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue.

https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2

https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4

Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks

[Nigel_Carr]

Pleasure Zack!

[znotes]

Thanks for your help on this Nigel

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Zack

If you have specified No URLs in search console or set to crawl only say, one, it's just a matter of time before they are dropped from the index. Just be patient and it should resolve itself.

There are ways to block them completely using robots.txt or a rewrite in htaccess but I haven't used them - maybe someone else can advise:

https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/86853/how-to-correctly-remove-parameters-from-the-google-index

https://www.hallaminternet.com/avoiding-the-seo-pitfalls-of-url-parameters/

Regards Nigel

[znotes]

Hey Nigel,

These parameters are already in my search console but Moz is still picking them up as duplicates.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Zack - That's where parameters come in to play - if you look further down you can specify which one if any to allow to be crawled.

Choose the parameter from the list then choose whether they narrow, sort etc and pick 'narrow' then choose what Google does.You can exclude all sorted pages this way.

Regards

Nigel

[znotes]

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for the response and the post, I've actually read the article before and used the rel=next and rel=prev to fix some duplicate content issues because of pagination in the past.

Right now, the rel=next and rel=prev is not solving my duplication problems because pagination isn't the issue so the speak. The duplication is occurring because i have two page types (one at view 60 items and one at view 180 items - kind of like a filter) Each view (60 & 180) has their own set of pagination rules but it looks like page 4 of the 60 view is a duplicate of page 2 of the 180 view if that makes sense.

It becomes really tricky here to try and find a solution.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Zack

There area  number of ways of dealing with this problem all of which are covered here: https://moz.rainyclouds.online/blog/seo-guide-to-google-webmaster-recommendations-for-pagination

For me when I have sort problems I go to parameters and specify exactly what Google should do with the result. It's reasonably simply to use parameters in search console and specify NO URLs for the parameter ?view

However, a word of warning - you have to be really careful doing this as you could end up blocking the whole site with the slightest slip. Like canonicals, no indexing and robots.txt - get a good SEO just to take a look.

Best Regards

Nigel - Carousel Projects