Case 1 : That may be a mistake done by the SEO firm: rel=canonical
to the first page of a paginated series
Imagine that you have an article that spans several pages:
example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=1
example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=2
and so on
Specifying a rel=canonical
from page 2 (or any later page) to page 1
is not correct use of rel=canonical
, as these are not duplicate pages. Using rel=canonical
in this instance would result in the content on pages 2
and beyond not being indexed at all. Source
Case 2 : That may not be a mistake considering the recent developments. When we talk about putting paginated content accross. We do it using
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article-part2.html">
on the first page and then using
<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article-part1.html">
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article-part3.html">
on the subsequesnt pages. Check your code for a presence of this kind of stuff. Source
In case you are seeing the first case then be prompt and get your source code changed right away.