A few years back Google decided to do us a solid and came up with a way to make any paginated content easier to crawl and index. This also helped prevent certain issues with duplicate content, crawler limitations, and search results. However, lately DFM has run into a few situations where these simple fixes had yet to be implemented. We decided it would be wise to do a quick refresher on the importance of these rel attributes for blog, news, e-commerce, and forum sites.

First lets answer the question “What is pagination?” Pagination refers to the segmentation of content across multiple pages. For an e-commerce site this may be multiple products organized in a single category. Or, on a blog page organized from newest to oldest entries.

Pagination

Rel=”prev” and rel=”next” are important for a number of reasons. Have you ever searched for something and were brought to the first page of a forum thread with multiple pages? I don’t know about you but I do not want to read through a bunch of possibly irrelevant information to answer my question or get to what I’ve been looking for. This is a problem with not having rel=”prev” and rel=”next” implemented in these pages.

Other potentials for inconvenience are duplicate content errors and missed opportunity for a page being crawled and indexed properly. Duplicate content will occur on page titles and meta descriptions. For example, a blog may have a page title along the lines of “Blog | Wonderful and Important Information” and the meta description may read “This is a blog of wonderful and important information provided to you by stuff and such.” If this blog has 26 pages of entries and no rel=”prev” and rel=”next” a crawler will see that page title and meta description 26 times… I shouldn’t have to tell you why that is undesirable. Finally crawlers will only dive so deep into these pages without the rel= attribute. The more paginated content on your site the less likely a crawler is going to go through all those pages, entries, products, etc.

So how do you put in the rel=”prev” and rel=”next” into your paginated content? Simply insert in your pages head tag! (Where most of the SEO stuff goes). Now here’s where it gets slightly tedious and time consuming… these need to be on every page AND you need to reference the previous and next page using href=”your pages URL” />

Here’s an example from the Digital Firefly Marketing blog

rel-“rev” rel=”next”

Now that you’ve implemented these rel attributes, sit back and relax, you’re good to go!