Great work, but lines 28 and 29 of your code seem to be lacking the actual tags to output.

nice… but too bad it’s a template override and not an extension though.
Failed creating an extension myself. The link rel prev and next keeps being overwritten by canonical.

With the implementation of rel next and prev you don’t have to disable the canonical URL. At least not regarding the article on the Google Webmaster Blog. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
[quote]rel=”next” and rel=”previous” on the one hand and rel=”canonical” on the other constitute independent concepts. Both declarations can be included in the same page. [/quote]

@Toni -> True. That’s why I use some custom development just like Vanja points out.

Hi Vanja – I have created a small module for this – might be helpful

Hi Drew,

One question regarding your module.

Why all urls include parameters like attribute param, list, order, dir, price ???

We lost all benefit due to it ?

@Drew Hunter: your module works perfect but if I enable the “All” option in the “Show X Per Page” dropdown and choose “All” in frontend it only shows me one product even when I have e.g. 400 products in this category. If I disable your module it works like it should with the “All” option. Is it a bug?

Thanks for your answer in advance,
Marcus

@Drew Hunter: cool!

Hi Marcus – grab the latest source code. There was a missing method call – all should now be working correctly.

Hi Drew,

I have one question for you.

I wanted to add the rel start to your module.
Like this way :

		if (!$pager->isFirstPage() && $numPages > 1) {
			$headBlock->addItem('link_rel', $pager->getPagerUrl(array($pager->getPageVarName() => NULL)), 'rel="start" rev="child" type="text/html"');
		}

But unfortunatly the method getPagerUrl return nothing.
That is a bit strange because I used this method elsewhere and it works perfectly.

I tried also Mage::registry(‘current_category’)->getUrl() but it return nothing neither…

However, Mage::registry(‘current_category’) seems filled when you call the event observer.

Have you some advice ?

Cheers,
Ilan

Thanks all for sharing your experience.
@Drew Hunter: Thanks Drew for its module, it is working fine.

Why you don’t instead copy the app/design/frontend/base/default/template/pager.phtml file and put it in your theme and set in the “a” tag the attribute “rel=prev” or “rel=next” in the correct link?!!!! It’s a cleaner solution instead of make your complicated code and work for all pages using the pager navigation.

Below a sample of the pager.phtml
isFirstPage()){ ?>
<a rel="prev" class="previousgetAnchorTextForPrevious()): ?> i-previous” href=”javascript:ajaxLoad(‘getPreviousPageUrl() ?>’);” title=”__(‘Previous’) ?>”>
<img src="getSkinUrl(‘images/i_pager-prev.gif’) ?>” alt=”__(‘Previous’) ?>” class=”v-middle” />getAnchorTextForPrevious()): echo $this->getAnchorTextForPrevious(); endif;*/ echo (!$this->isFirstPage())? ”:”; ?>

….

isLastPage()){ ?>
<a rel="next" class="next" href="javascript:ajaxLoad(‘getNextPageUrl() ?>’);” title=”__(‘Next’) ?>”>
getAnchorTextForNext()): echo $this->getAnchorTextForNext(); endif;*/ ?><img src="getSkinUrl(‘images/i_pager-next.gif’) ?>” alt=”__(‘Next’) ?>” class=”v-middle” />isLastPage())? ”:”; ?>

In my oppinon. the best solution ist to use the new rel=pref and rel=next und set canonical fpr categories to no.

The problem is, we have many many paremeters to sort the products, so we still need the canonical tag. (WMT parameter settings did not work – actually we got over 70.000 pages in teh google index – but we only have about 2.500 “real” pages. Is there a better canonical extension then the original magento one? Because like you guys said before, the magento canonical isn’t perfect it points page 20 to page 1.

For anyone else struggling with this – i figured it out from a variation of the code posted here

http://inchoo.net/online-marketing/how-do-relnext-and-relprev-work/

This will only select the current products in the category to work with

Hi,
First of all I would like to thank all of you for sharing your expertise.
I have been reading this post since I faced the same problem with link rel and canonical in conjuntion, as Toni well described… I have not been able to solve it yet. Has any of you finally solved it?
Thanks you all

THANKS THANKS THANKS, just copied-pasted and worked!!!!

Works like a charm in 1.4 BUT there’s is one thing to improve: Magento still will create a /your-search-page?p=1 as a duplicate of /your-search-page.

I’ve solved this by tweaking the same file head.phtml on the line for robots :
0 )
$indexing = false;

if($indexing ==true)
{
//We use the option set in Magento admin
?>
<meta name="robots" content="getRobots()) ?>” />

I use this method to eliminate pages I don’t want to be indexed (including parameter like “dir,mode,price…”), but I suppose this is a different topic.

THANKS THANKS THANKS, just copied-pasted and worked!!!!

Works like a charm in 1.4 BUT there’s is one thing to improve: Magento still will create a /your-search-page?p=1 as a duplicate of /your-search-page.

I’ve solved this by tweaking the same file head.phtml on the line for robots :

//Old line:
//<meta name="robots" content="<?php echo htmlspecialchars($this->getRobots()) ?>" />
//Substituted by the following code:
$indexing = true;
$url=$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
if(substr_count($url, "?p=1") > 0 )
	$indexing = false;
<?php
if($indexing ==true)
{
 //Use of the option set in Magento admin
?>
<meta name="robots" content="<?php echo htmlspecialchars($this->getRobots()) ?>" />
<?php
}else{
?>
<meta name="robots" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" />
<?php
}
?>

I use this method to eliminate pages I don’t want to be indexed (including parameter like “dir,mode,price…”), but I suppose this is a different topic.

Yes, but if you disable rel canonical as you described, then this may cause Mass dup content issues due to URL rewrite.

Currently, I have set URL rewrite to SEF URLs and I have canonical tags set to each page. In some cases though paginated content appears with rel canonical to each page, i.e. ?page=2 has rel canonical to ?page=2 which is not good…

But still it is better than handle the paginated content and have x2 of all of your pages due to URL rewrite, isn’t it?