How to Configure Blog Page Pagination, Noindex Tags & Canonicalization tags

Incorrect canonical tags and “noindex” directives prevent Google from indexing paginated pages and the posts they contain. Google’s guidelines recommend unique canonical URLs for each paginated page. Correcting the canonical tags and removing the “noindex” meta tag directive from paginated pages enable proper indexing, improving search visibility of both paginated pages and blog posts.

The Transcript

0:00 I was on the Brookdale Community College website earlier today for reasons that, uh, I’ll explain in another video. No, I’m not going back to school, to Brookdale Community College.

0:11 But I did go there, well, a long time ago at this point. And I stumbled upon, uh, I stumbled upon a technical SEO configuration that I wanted to share.

0:21 It’s involving the alumni pages, because I was looking for something regarding, regarding alumni. And, uh, so I clicked abuse source.

0:32 So don’t, don’t run away. This is not terribly complicated. You do not know, you don’t need to know how to code it to understand this. I’m going to walk you through it.

0:39 So this is the page. This is the URL that I was just on, right? Alumni page slash three and you’ll notice that the canonical tag is not that URL.

0:54 It is slash category slash alumni. So what we’re telling Google there is basically take all the credit for alumni page three, the page we are actually looking at, and give it to the category page.

1:09 The one page that shows up when you click on the navigation. And so what that does is all the other paginated pages in the sequence, and there’s 10 plus in the sequence.

1:22 We’re telling Google to stay away. Not only are we telling it to stay away with the canonical tag, but we’re also explicitly telling it to go away with the no index, no follow, which means, uh, don’t index this page.

1:37 And if you can’t index this page, then you can’t crawl the items on the page. And if you can’t crawl the items on the page, then all those posts have no chance of showing up in Google.

1:48 Not a good chance anyway. So the reason why I wanted to bring this up is because this isn’t specific to Brookdale or to WordPress is what they’re using.

1:57 If you of a blog and you’re using WordPress or Shopify or whatever. Or some other system, you could have this setting on as well.

2:03 So all those blog pages that you are producing, if your canonicalization is wrong, if you’re telling Google one of two things, no index, the paginated pages, or the canonicalization of all those paginated pages point back to the one, uh, category page, in this case, You category alumni, what you’re doing

2:27 is, what you’re doing is essentially, uh, reducing your SU visibility of all your posts. So let’s, let’s take a look at what Google specifically says about paginated pages and canonicalization.

2:44 So we’re on Google Search Central and they say don’t use the first page of a paginated sequence as the canonical page.

2:51 Instead, give each page its own canonical URL. And that is exactly not what’s happening here. Right. Again, it points over to the category page and that is not the URL.

3:05 Also, our good friends over at Conductor, the good people at Conductor, have this article, uh, and they pulled a quote from John Mueller.

3:13 Who says, we generally pick, this is regarding having no index and canonical tags on the pages. We generally pick the rel canonical and use that over the no index.

3:26 But here’s the more important part. But anytime you rely on interpretation by a computer script, you reduce the weight of your input and SEO and SEO is.

3:37 To a large part, all about telling computer scripts, your preferences, aka, don’t let Google make decisions for you, code your pages correctly.

3:45 In this case, what we need to do, what Brookdale needs to do is they need to make the canonical tag that URL at the top.

3:56 So it’s listed as slash alumni slash page slash three remove that no index that will open up indexation, crawl and indexation for all of these posts, all of these posts that we’re looking at here and all of these posts.

4:12 Oh, you got some slow load time and all of these posts, right? There’s how many posts are there? Five pages.

4:25 Eight pages. Is there more? Eight pages. So that’s a lot of posts that just have zero chance of showing up for SEO.

4:36 This may or may not be your case of the blog. Go ask your SEO guy if you need help taking a look at that, reach out on LinkedIn, uh, or go to opticsin.com, fill out that discovery, uh, contact form.

4:48 We’d be happy to take a look.