Pagination is leading to duplicate meta descriptions

Publishing help SEO
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It says only use it if the total number of web pages are >1000.

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The issue that is reported in this thread is actually not an issue, according to Google’s own documentation. You can see their recommended practices for paginated pages here: Pagination Best Practices for Google | Google Search Central  |  Documentation  |  Google for Developers

In case this link changes, here are the essential points:

On duplicate titles/descriptions:

Normally, we recommend that you give web pages distinct titles to help differentiate them. However, pages in a paginated sequence don’t need to follow this recommendation. You can use the same titles and descriptions for all pages in the sequence. Google tries to recognize pages in a sequence and index them accordingly.

On URL parameters:

  • Give each page a unique URL . For example, include a ?page=n query parameter, as URLs in a paginated sequence are treated as separate pages by Google.
  • Don’t use URL fragment identifiers (the text after a # in a URL) for page numbers in a collection . Google ignores fragment identifiers. If Googlebot sees a URL to the next page that only differs by the text after the # , it may not follow the link, thinking it has already retrieved the page.

On canonical URLs:

  • Don’t use the first page of a paginated sequence as the canonical page . Instead, give each page in its own canonical URL.

So it seems that Webflow’s pagination system matches Google’s best practices, except perhaps for giving each paginated page its own canonical URL (which, to my knowledge, shouldn’t be an issue for the vast majority of Webflow websites where paginations are used).

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It is important to check and see if the duplicated title tage and meta descriptions are showing in google search console. you can find this in the indexed pages section and most likely they will be in the Duplicate without user-selected canonical section. If these pages are showing in here as well as your seo crawling software then it is an issue and I have managed to fix it for my client.

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Hey everyone. I had to create an account. I was able to handle this issue with the help of this article:

Suggest you watch this video in addition

Just don’t set up the redirect as it says in the article cuz it won’t be paginating in this case

Otherwise, it should work like a clock and content is actually loading even faster.

Hope it helps

1 Like
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Good thread here. I agree with Emile re: all the pagination default behavior, except for the canonical issue. Right now my paginated pages are using paramaters to make the URLs distinct, but each page’s canonical is automatically pointing back to the first page of the paginated sequence (the non parameterized page’s URL). This seems to be creating indexing issues. It looks like, according to Google, each one of these pages should have a self referencing canonical that includes the parameters.

I’m curious why you think that this should not be an issue, @EmileP ? It seems to be causing issues for me.

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Just noting;

  • The post is 5 years old
  • Webflow has changed how paginated canonicals are generated, so the original post is no longer relevant to the current product
  • Redirecting the paginated URLs breaks pagination. I don’t think that’s what you want. You could just turn it off if you don’t want it to function?
1 Like