Paging Module

Drupal's Paging Module is a popular way to break up nodes across multiple pages. This module does create some problematic SEO issues though.

As shown in the image above, the Paging Module is able to break up each node into multiple pages which creates more URLs. For example, if the page above had the URL http://example.com/page-title, the following other URLs would be created for the paginated views:

• The number 2 would link to http://example.com/page-title?page=0,1.
• The number 3 would link to http://example.com/page-title?page=0,2
• And when you are on either of those two sub-pages, the number 1 would link back to the first page as http://example.com/page-title?page=0,0 instead of its original URL at http://example.com/page-title.

That results in a single page of content with two different URLs: http://example.com/page-title?page=0,0 contains duplicate content of the node's main URL http://example.com/page-title.

Temporary SEO Fix

The current SEO fix is to add the following line to your robots.txt file to prevent the duplicate pages from being indexed:

Disallow: /*?page=0,0$

The syntax in the above robots.txt rule is recognized by Google Search, Yahoo Search, and MSN Live Search.

Module development recommendations

Future versions of this module should be built so that the main URL is not duplicated. The link back to the main node page should not have a query string. Also, it would be best if the URLs that it generates were not dynamic.

The following example shows a possible URL structure for this module that would be better for search engine indexing:

• Main node URL: http://example.com/page-title
• First pagination: http://example.com/page-title/1
• Second pagination: http://example.com/page-title/2
• and so on...