Should I Index Paginations on Google?
My Contribution to the World of Search Engine Optimization Blogging
Note: This blog posting deals with the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you're here for my latest music post, go here. If you're here for my latest recipe, click here.
Those pesky paginations: extensions of your home page, archive pages, and other pages that tend to gather a lot of posts and entries over time. I usually refer to paginations as “page 2’s”, because they start with page 2, 3, etc. They usually look like this:“www.website.com/page/2”, and they can get numerous, if you publish a lot of content. I found out the hard way that it’s possible to incur algorithmic penalties on Google, etc., if your “page 2’s” contain a lot of thin or duplicate content. To address this, you either have to go and optimize the content on each individual page (which can range in the thousands), delete a whole bunch of links, posts, etc. If you don’t have a few extra hundred hours in your day to do that, then there are 2 other options:
1. Set the paginations to “noindex” either with an .htaccess code or plugin; or
2. Add a few lines of code to your robots.txt file to “Disallow” search engines from crawling paginations. For example: Disallow: /page/*
Now, there are a few instances in which you shouldn’t de-index or disallow paginations. For example, if the only place to find a popular article on your blog is to find it all the way on page 1124 on the home page, you might inadvertently get that article de-indexed from Google. This reason is precisely why sitemaps are important. If you have to disallow or “noindex” your paginations, you need to make sure that all of your most relevant content on Google can be found in a sitemap. This is why I use at least 2 different kinds of sitemaps: one for pages, posts, and categories, and one for video content.
Honestly, the best way to determine whether or not you should allow indexing of your paginations is to check your site coverage in Google Search Console, and compare the changes in coverage with your rise/fall in your Google rankings. If your rankings go down every time Google indexes more “page 2’s”, etc., then you should probably consider de-indexing or disallowing the paginations.
To learn more about de-indexing paginations in .htaccess, check out the following article:
To learn more about disallowing paginations in robots.txt, go here:
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