Canonical links and paging

Question

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

I was wondering if this feature works great with paging?

For example: I have a page that contains 8 pages of content if I specify the canonical symbol http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/154/iso-always-detected-as-a-movie-when-checking-metadata for pages, will there be any unwanted side effects? Would it be better overall? Does this mean that getting to page 5 will lead users to page 1?

Answer 1

When you specify a canonical URL, it should have almost the same content. Pages 2-8 have different content. Yes, if Google follows your canonical link on page 5, it will 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 like http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/154/iso-always-detected-as-a-movie-when-checking-metadata

You can also put canonical links on other pages to let Google know that http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=5 is the same as http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page= 5 & ​​response_type = 3

Answer 2

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

In your case, all pages have different contents (although they represent several pages of the same article or conversation topic). This means that you do not need to canonize them.

However, all that happens is that Google pays more attention to the first page and not to other pages when they appear in search results.

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

More info from google here.