Canonical links and paging

Question

Google has been pushing its new canonical link feature, I agree it is really useful. Now instead of having a ton of entry points in to an area you can have one entry.

I was wondering, does this feature play nice with paging?

For example: I have this page which has 8 pages of content, if I specify the canonical of http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/154/iso-always-detected-as-a-movie-when-checking-metadata for the page, will there be any undesired side effects? Will this be better overall? Will this mean that a hit on page 5 will take users to page 1?

Answer 1

When specifying a canonical URL, it should have substantially the same content. Pages 2-8 have different content. Yes, if Google were to honor your canonical link on page 5, it would send users to page 1.

You should use the canonical link on page 1 so that Google knows that http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154 and http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=1&response%5Ftype=3 are the same as http://community.mediabrowser.tv/permalinks/154/iso-always-detected-as-a-movie-when-checking-metadata

You may also want to put canonical links on the other pages so Google knows that http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=5 is the same as http://community.mediabrowser.tv/topics/154?page=5&response%5Ftype=3