Pagination Links Indexing on Google Causing SEO Issues

Publishing help SEO
1

Hi everone,

I’m facing a pagination-related SEO problem on my website. I’m using the Finsweet Filter, Load, and Combine libraries to implement product filtering functionality. However, I’ve noticed that paginated URLs with query strings, such as ?cc00babb_page=58, are being indexed by Google and appearing in search results. That ^^ specific one was even a highlighted sub link.

When I click on these links, they direct me to my homepage, but the product filtering is already applied, showing different products than expected. This results in a confusing and potentially broken experience for users.

Additionally, these queried links are appended and indexerd on individual product display pages, since each product page has a “similar products” paginated collection.

What I’ve tried so far:

  • About two weeks ago, I added nofollow tags to the pagination buttons in my product filtering system. However, this was implemented after the system was already live.

Any suggestions on how to prevent these query-based URLs from being indexed or further SEO strategies to handle this?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Side note: Would it be so wrong to use robots.txt to instruct Google to not index urls with “_page=” ?

[SITE]

Here is my site Read-Only: [LINK]1
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2

Webflow added pagination querystrings to auto-generated canonicals about a year ago with no option to switch it off. You have a few options;

  • Turn off auto-generated canonicals and add your own into each page head.
  • Use auto-generated canonicals, but override the querystring using script or reverse-proxy
  • Possibly, use script or RP to add a noindex meta only to the querystringed pages ( this is dicey, as it Google may also choose to apply that rule to the main page ).
  • Detect the querystring, and do a popup to explain that they should filter for whatever they’re looking for ( unlikely that you can get the google search terms from referer but you could try ).
  • Just accept it,. Users know that pages change, so there’s not much harm here.
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I will most likely turn off auto generated canonicals and insert my own into each page head. Thankfully my site is mostly CMS items so its easy enough to explore this as a potential solution.

Thank you for your time and response, it is detailed and much appreciated !

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