: Handling Duplicate Content & Pagination with Category Description I have an ecommerce site with paginated product categories. I would like to add a description for each category to improve the

@Radia820

Pagination is not duplicate content...

Google will and does index pagination pages regardless of the uniqueness of the page. Also, it is massively common for webmasters to not understand exactly what duplicate content is.

Understanding what duplicate content is...

Duplicate content is where the exact page appears elsewhere external or internally, product pagination pages, blog pagination and so forth are not duplicate because the snippets in combination with other snippets makes the page unique... page 2/3 is duplicate of page 2/3, but it is not duplicate of 1/3, or the actual product or article URL.

Canonical is not needed on such pages

Using canonical links tells Google where the main source URL can be found, it makes little to no difference if you use, or don't use canonical links on your pagination pages, in fact the entire Stack Exchange network with millions of tag paginations does not use canonical at all (on this pages), and they have no indexing problems at all.

Page Content Descriptions

Having some type of page description is preferable if it adds to the user experience, but it's not required to rank those type of pages.

Stack Exchange on tag pages users a description provided by the tag description, this is often repeated again, and again over 10's of pages, again... no indexing problems, some pages may not even have a description because one has not been provided by the community.

If you do believe that it adds user value to the page then by all means add a description, and if you wanted to extend further onto that and have unique headers with page numbers, and slightly different descriptions for each categories then by using WordPress codex you can do so.

On my WordPress site and on my category pages for example, I change the a few words depending what category is being displayed You are viewing: <?php single_cat_title(); ?>. I even add different titles, and meta descriptions, and use suffix (page 1 of n). I even went to the extent of adding different welcome messages to each category depending what time of day it was, totally overkill... but nice touch at the time I thought, but all this isn't required.

Here's a look at the code I use if you wanted to adapt, or get ideas from:

<?php
/* This sets the $time variable to the current hour in the 24 hour clock format */
$time = date("H");
/* Set the $timezone variable to become the current timezone */
$timezone = date("e");
/* If the time is less than 1200 hours, show good morning */
if ($time < "12") {
echo "Good morning,";
} else
/* If the time is grater than or equal to 1200 hours, but less than 1700 hours, so good afternoon */
if ($time >= "12" && $time < "17") {
echo "Good afternoon,";
} else
/* Should the time be between or equal to 1700 and 1900 hours, show good evening */
if ($time >= "17" && $time < "19") {
echo "Good evening,";
} else
/* Finally, show good night if the time is greater than or equal to 1900 hours */
if ($time >= "19") {
echo "Hey Night Owl,";
}
?> You're viewing all our articles within the following categories <?php single_cat_title(); ?>. The BYBE blog has many more categories that you will help you find useful and relevant articles, here is our major categories: <?php $categories = get_tags( array('orderby' => 'name', 'parent' => 0) ); foreach ( $categories as $category ) { printf( '<a title="View all articles tagged with %2$s" href="%1$s">%2$s</a> ', esc_url( get_category_link( $category->term_id ) ), esc_html( $category->name ));} ?>. If you have any questions, concerns or complaints regarding any of our online articles, then please don't hesitate to <a href="/contact-us" title="Contact the BYBE team in Bournemouth">get in touch</a>. Alternatively you can reach us on <a href="https://twitter.com/bybe_net" title="Reach us on Twitter">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://plus.google.com/+ByBeBournemouth" title="Talk to BYBE on Google Plus">Google Plus</a>, or <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ByBeUK" title="Reach our team on Facebook">Facebook</a>.</p>


Titles and Meta Descriptions

Google does prefer to see unique meta descriptions and titles, thankfully this is an easy task when using YoastSEO thanks to the supported variable's, if you take a look at my site you can see that each propagation page displays a different page number after 1, suppressing those nagging warnings in Webmaster Tools (Console).

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@LarsenBagley505

I have an ecommerce site with paginated product categories.

I would like to add a description for each category to improve the "thin content" problem ecommerce pages generally have.


That can go on the first page of each product category so that people are introduced to the category.


I would like this paragraph description to show on each page of its respective category, but how do I avoid the duplicate content issue.


Change it up. At the very least, make the paragraph mention what page the user is on and what the last page is in the category as well as how many items are to be shown. Also, include next to the products themselves a brief description of the product, but avoid using the exact same description for every product. Then when someone selects a product, then on the product page, offer a story about the product.


First thing that comes to mind is rel="canonical" to point back to the first page, but according to Yoast, that's not such a good idea...


If you follow my suggestions to make each page of the category completely different, then I'd agree that canonical is a bad idea and also you can have more pages indexed since then google will treat your pages as separate well thought-out articles.

Until that time comes, I'd suggest applying rel-canonical to all the pages (except the first) and point them to the first so that google understands that what you have is a set of pages for a product category so that at least something is indexed instead of nothing.

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