Sites often tend to paginate their content
into several, smaller logical chunks that make it easier for readers to
navigate through and keep track of. You can often see this type of
thing in in-depth product reviews, where there are different sections
divided into different pages. Similarly, news and other such publishing
sites often tend to divide a very long article into several smaller
chunks. Discussion forums also often break threads into sequential URLs.
People have often asked us about how to handle such type of Pagination
from a SEO point of view, because you want search engines to be able to associate all the related 'pages' together. Well, today, we'll tell you about the correct SEO Settings to paginate large content on your site.
When paginating, you can do two things to help search engines understand
your content structure. You could either specify a view all page, or
you could use rel="prev" and rel="next" to describe the associativity.
A View-all Page
You can create two versions of your content. One View-all page, which
has all of the content on the same page. Some readers prefer this, since
it doesn't require additional page loads. Google tries to show this
page in search results. However, you can also create paginated version
of the same content, and then use rel="canonical" on each component
page, pointing to that View-all page, so as to avoid content
duplication.
Using rel="prev" and rel="next"
You can use the next and prev attributes in HTML links, so as to
describe the relation between two page. For example, suppose your
content is broken up into three separate pages.
- example.com/part1.html
- example.com/part2.html
- example.com/part3.html
Now, on the first page, you simply need to define a "next" page only,
since there's no "prev" page. Similarly, for the last page, there's no
"next" page; only a "prev" page.
- For the first page, you can simply add a link to the next page using the <link> tag inside the <head> tag.
<link rel="next" href="http://example.com/part2.html">
- Similarly, the last page (part3) needs a link tag in its <head> section as follows
<link rel="prev" href="http://example.com/part2.html">
- Since all the middle parts have both previous and next counterparts, you need to include two links in such parts.
<link rel="prev" href="http://example.com/part1.html">
<link rel="next" href="http://example.com/part3.html">
Things to remember
The rel="prev" and rel="next" attributes are just hints to Google.
They're not absolute directives. Meaning that they don't define the
content or anything. They just tell Google what comes before and after
this content.
URL parameters that don't change a page's content should also be included in the prev and next links. Examples of such parameters include session IDs, tracking number etc. Suppose you have a page example.com/article?page=2&id=123. It should contain the following link tags.
- <link rel="prev" href="http://example.com/article?page=1&id=123">
- <link rel="next" href="http://example.com/article?page=3&id=123">
So you needn't worry about getting it wrong. But just make sure you don't make a mistake while using rel="canonical" (discussed above). Otherwise, you should be fine.
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