Jan 11 2010

Possible Help with Pagination Issue: Rel=”Next”

Pagination can cause some serious indexing and ranking problems, yet it is sometimes hard (if not impossible) to avoid. For large database-driven sites and web catalogs it creates duplicate content problems (with multiple pages within one category / tag having one and the same title tags), as well content discovery issues (with the crawl not willing to go deep to the site and thus discovering product pages listed on pages 10-20 or deeper).

There’s one possible solution that might help crawlers better understand the site paging structure and thus treat it accordingly (for example use the pages for discovery without indexing them).

rel=”next” and rel=”prev” are used to describe the position of a document within a series of documents. These link definitions may be used by crawlers to better understand the web site navigation. 

<HEAD>
...other head information...
<TITLE>Chapter 5</TITLE>
<LINK rel="prev" href="chapter4.html">
<LINK rel="next" href="chapter6.html">
</HEAD>

Even if they are not used for navigation, these links may be interpreted in interesting ways. For example, a user agent that prints a series of HTML documents as a single document may use this link information as the basis of forming a coherent linear document.

So far it is unclear how Google and other search engines treat the link attributes but who knows, these attributes won’t hurt for sure.

Here are more tips on avoiding duplicate content with pagination I offered earlier:

  • Add a different portion of the title/ description to the beginning. e.g. <title>A-G Blue Widgets</title> (not always possible);
  • Put all the content in one html document. Then use JavaScript to create pagination without reloading the page (only possible with smaller sites);
  • Add NoIndex meta tag to the each page except the first one to keep search engines from indexing the pages but still allow them to crawl and follow the links (PageRank is still leaked in this case).

Note: the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes are discussed in this forum thread. Many thanks to Webnauts for pointing the discussion out to me.

4 Responses to “Possible Help with Pagination Issue: Rel=”Next””

  1. Alex says:
    January 20, 2010 at 5:25 pm

    This is an interesting and helpful post… I work for a digital media company and we offer services including web design applications, SEO/digital marketing, and user interface web design. We’ve had trouble recently getting indexed for pages deeper within our site and it’s been a mystery as to why this is, despite our efforts to counter it. Personally I am not familiar with how our html is structured in wordpress, but i passed this on to one of our developers who mentioned that we were not doing what was suggested above; however, he said that we have a wordpress plug in that he thought was taking care of this issue. Does anyone have any feedback on that, or has anyone been experiencing a similar issue with deep links? I’ve found the same problem happening for some of our clients as well.

  2. Paul says:
    May 17, 2010 at 3:26 pm

    Head over and have a read of this blog post http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/blog/the-impact-of-pagination-on-seo/

    It outlines some of the best ways to deal with SEO pagination along with which of the solutions is the most suitable for your website / needs :)

  3. Programmer's Forum says:
    November 8, 2010 at 2:04 am

    I could include this pagination seo tips to my academic project. Thanks..

  4. Jenifer says:
    December 8, 2010 at 4:43 pm

    Did you know that the Basic HTML Color set is a combination of 216 color? You can find a tabulated view of the basic HTML color on the internet. It can be handy when you need to quickly choose a standard HTML color for your site or any other project.