Add a rel=”nofollow” parameter to the {pagination_links} tag output.
Feature Requests
Search bots are following pagination links and returning links back to pages that are just a list of entries. Mostly those pages are of little use to humans and we don’t want to encourage traffic to them.
We don’t want those pages showing up in results from search bots, but we still need the bots to follow the entries own links out to single entry pages.
Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to add a parameter to the output of the pagination_links tag output.
Robin and I discussed this in ticket/88256 in the paid support area.
Thanks for listening.
- Kurt
But doesn’t rel=”nofollow” only instruct search engines that the hyperlink should not influence the ranking of the link’s target in the search engine’s index? As far as I know that won’t prevent bots from actually following these links.
Whats about the option to add a “nofollow” and/or ” noindex” META tag to this pages? Wouldn’t it be the same?
Please see:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
I believe this information is still current.
There are page links to single entry pages that I do want bots to follow, but I don’t want bots to follow the pagination links as the paginated pages are not so friendly to our project.
We want to allow a visitor to see the whole list of entries if they like, but we don’t want to promote that way of visiting them.
Maybe a working example would help you see what we’re doing:
That help?
If you’re using template layouts… you could have this in the <head>:
{if !layout:follow}<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">{/if}Then your pagination links would be something like…
{paginate}
{if current_page == 1 }
{layout:set name="follow"}<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">{/layout:set}
{if:else}
{layout:set name="follow"}<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">{/layout:set}
{/if}
{/paginate}This would tell the search engines to index the first page but not follow links, and the other pages would not be indexed or followed…
There’s also nothing to prevent you from using pagination_page_number and seeing if it’s greater than 1, if so add the rel=”nofollow” to the link…
</code></pre>
Adding the one canonical link to this template will also help
So for
- http://domain.com/entries/
- http://domain.com/entries/P5
- http://domain.com/entries/P10
- http://domain.com/entries/P15
Make sure for all these that the same canonical link appears in the header.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://domain.com/entries/" />Doing this means that the search results will be more likely to show users that URL structure
Thanks John Henry! This reply helped me too.