Canonical for articles comments (pages)

[Matt]

I've had a read and the general consensus is that you don't need the canonical tag on page >= 2 as the next/prev tags take care of that.

I think what I'll do for blog and pages is:

1) Show the canonical on page 1
2) Do not show canonical on page >=2 UNLESS there are other inline params to filter comments and the canonical will point to the root page because the filters will change what the pages contain.

[Sonya*]

3 minutes ago, Matt said:

as the next/prev tags take care of that

These tags are not supported by Google any more. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

[Matt]

I guess this really means that Google is relying less on what the mark-up says, and more on how it computes relationships. Which makes sense as you can 'game' things via the markup.

[Sonya*]

Adding pages to sitemap can help 

We have did it a week ago and increased at least crawling significantly:

However it's still to early to say what our coverage and organic search would do next weeks. I can give a feedback if you are interested.

[Matt]

I'm always interested, and would love to know.

We often make decisions based on research and our own experience, so balancing that out with more data always helps.

Now I'm thinking of going back to a setting. I've read tons on canonical link for pagination and the general thought is "it depends".

I still maintain that for a classic "article with comments" you want page 1 indexed and are less concerned with pages >=2 comments because it's the article you wrote that you want indexed, not potentially 10 duplicate copies with different potentially low value comments (such as emoji thumbs up and gifs).

However, you raise a good point about databases being used for a different purpose where the reviews/comments are more important than the content you wrote. You might embed a Youtube video and ask for thoughts - and those user-contributed thoughts are more important than the Youtube embed.

So I think perhaps asking a question per database like:

"Strongly hint to search engines that"

[] All pages should be considered the same (such a posting a long-form article and expecting pages of comments)
[] All pages should be considered different (such as posting a link, and expecting pages of comments and reviews)

Maybe I can phrase it better, but I think this is really the only solution. Having such flexibility in Pages is both a blessing and a curse.