I’m going to put this link right here.

This is part of some research I’m conducting.  Just a little personal research about indexation through social media channels, along side another experiment about nofollow links.

I’ve been thinking a lot about pagination and how to navigate the rel=”next/prev” and canonical tags. I wrote a fairly detailed article about how I think rel=next, rel=prev and canonical tags should be implemented over on the Ironworks blog.

I wanted to re-iterate some of the basic points that article attempts to address here in my own blog.

Do not use the canonical tag to point back to Page 1

I get that the idea is that you might think page=2 is considered duplicate content as the page 1 landing page you want to rank. It’s a valid concern and you might be right to some degree. However, using the canonical tag here just doesn’t do what you think it ought to. Remember that the canonical tag is acting like a redirect a “soft 301″ if you will. Imagine what would happen to a crawler if you used a regular 301 back to the first page every time a crawler hit page 2. See where I’m going with this?

Rel=next/prev are doing the heavy lifting

The Next/Prev tags are actually now performing the function we may have thought the canonical tag was doing for us when it comes to pagination. They’re consolidating all the indexing information into one aggregate. That’s kinda like what we though the canonical tag would do, right? It removes any sense of competition or duplication by creating a sort of “view all” version of the result set for the search engine.

So that’s the short answer. Read the Ironworks article for more details…

So I’ve been using Google+ for a couple days now and Hangouts are quickly becoming my favorite feature. However, there are a couple of ways Google could improve on it and I’ll be more than happy to share them with you… Read More

Thanks to a kind co-worker, I’m now on Google+. You can add me/follow me at https://plus.google.com/105128552991606069950

Hi all! Here’s a quick video I did for Apartments.com. I’m discussing how view your website’s success at attracting traffic for entire groups of keywords or phrases. Enjoy and please let me know if there are any topics you’d like to see me tackle in the future.