Question

What is the best approach for formatting Canonical links on a search engine style website? At the minute our search engine fetches results and paginates them. We currently set the Canonical URL paginated pages back to the 1st page so:

Examples

http://jobportfolio.co.uk/jobs/any/london
Canonical = http://www.jobportfolio.co.uk/jobs/any/london

http://jobportfolio.co.uk/jobs/any/london/?&page=2
Canonical = http://www.jobportfolio.co.uk/jobs/any/london

Is this the best approach or should I be setting the Canonical URL to also include the &page=2?

I noticed that when I submitted the XML Sitemap only a small fraction of the pages were indexed.

Thanks

Oliver

Answer 1

Only use canonical for pages/URLs with (almost) identical content. Your pagination pages clearly have different content.