How to Use rel=canonical tags?

Web Development
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Using ‘old’ pagination techniques is entirely unavoidable as the ‘old’ approaches are still important, especially when it comes to internal linking. Internal linking will make it easier for search engine bots to find paginated pages.

Therefore, you need to use anchor text to link to paginated pages. In addition, you need to use the canonical link.

To effectively use it, you need to create a ‘view all’ page as in the eBay example we looked at earlier. This is a page that shows all the products or pages, with all the products in a particular category, or even all the products on the site, depending on the structure and size of a site.

You then need to put the canonical tag on all the pages where the pagination landing page redirects to. Note that the URL on the canonical tag should be the ‘view all’ one.

Here is what you need to add to the header on each of the pages with pagination. Make paginated pages canonical

This may be something that is hard to do if you look at things from the perspective of the ‘old’ pagination techniques, which advised that only the pagination landing page needs to be indexed. This approach causes problems as it may result in paginated pages which are deeper in the link structure not being indexed at all.

This article by Google explains how to go about making [a page canonical

Get a grip on your link structure

We had mentioned that pagination dilutes ranking signals, for example with backlinks, where links cannot pass link equity to each other. One way to solve this problem is to ensure that your link structure is not too deep. You need to reduce the number of links from the pagination landing page to the specific paginated pages.

When you have ‘shallow’ link depth, then link juice can be passed to paginated pages, giving them a chance to rank as standalone pages.