Change canonical on paginated pages

When a search engine crawls page one of an archive, it needs to know it’s a paginated archive. For the longest time, the only way for it to know that something was a paginated archive is when it found a “next” or “previous link”. This was solved by the introduction of rel=”next” and rel=”prev” link-elements, to be applied in the head of a page.

For a while, there was a discussion in the SEO community about how to combine this with rel canonical. Should page 2 and further of an archive have a canonical link to page 1, or to itself? The idea was that you mostly want visitors to end up on page 1 of an archive. That page is usually the most relevant for the majority of users.

Google is very clear now: each page within a paginated series should canonicalize to itself, so /page/2/ has a canonical pointing to /page/2/.

You can learn more about it here — https://yoast.com/pagination-seo-best-practices/

@mikes41720 Thank you for taking the time to answer but I know that. I have a good reason why I want to do it that way, I would just like some help to do it.

Thank you.

thank q

You or your developer can use the wpseo_canonical filter to customize this feature. Some example snippets can be found here.

As you’re “not very good at php”, we recommend checking out Code Poet, WordPress Jobs, or WordPress Professional Network for custom development & consultancy.

Thank you for the anwser!

@vladnice You’re welcome. We are going ahead and marking this issue as resolved. If you require any further assistance please create a new issue.