Pagination in SEO
Yet another SEO ballache you didn’t see coming…
Pagination is an issue when you have content that spans more than 1 page. For example, an article that spans 3 pages of a website, or a forum thread etc.
It’s often an issue on e-commerce websites too.
This can cause problems:
1. Crawling – site indexation probs – not getting pages indexed
2. Getting the wrong page index, so people end up arriving on page 3, instead of page 1
3. Duplicate content issue – if it’s a forum, or an e-commerce site with recurring images, text etc. on each page.
Solution 1
View All Pages
This solution, involves, taking all the different pages of your article, or forum, or whatever, and putting them on one massive page, that encompasses all the content from all of the pages.
Google is likely to index this page; which sometimes defeats the object of splitting the content up into different sections. Either way, if you use this “View All Pages”, make sure the actual View All Pages page, is easy to navigate, and doesn’t take too long to load.
The main advantage of this, is the links and the link-equity, all get put onto the View All Pages page.
On each page, the smaller, original pages. Make sure they have canonical tags in the <head> that point to the View All Page
Solution 2
rel=prev and rel=next
On Page 1 of your content (let’s say it’s an article), put the following code in your <head> :
<link rel="next" href="page=2"/>
On page 2 of the article put:
<link rel="prev" href="page=1"/>
<link rel="next" href="page=3"/>
Don’t put a canonical tag back to the 1st page from each individual page.
This is used on when a View All Page exist, due to the duplicate content issue.
Just canonicalise as normal i.e. just avoid problems with trailing slashes, .html etc. versions of the same page.
Solution 3
You can also use your robots.txt file to stop all the pages, except the first page, from being indexed
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,FOLLOW">
| Pagination Checklist |
| Uses a href HTML links? |
| Links need to be in the <head> |
| works with JS disabled? |
| Different page numbers have self-referencing canonical URLs? |
| Do Not Include Paginated Pages in Sitemaps |
| Optimize Meta Tags, If Possible – Different title on each page |
| Ensure that the robots’ meta-tag doesn’t contain noindex |
| Link to first page should be root page, not a parameter ?p=1 page |
| “Previous button” < on page 2 – should like to root page, not ?p=1 |
| You shouldn’t have a View All Page |
Placing the link attributes in the content. They’re only supported by search engines within the section of your HTML.
Adding a rel=”prev” link to the first page (a.k.a. the root page) in the series or a rel=”next” link to the last. For all other pages in the chain, both link attributes should be present.
Beware of your root page canonical URL. Chances are on ?page=2, rel=prev should link to the canonical, not a ?page=1.
The code of a four-page series will look something like this:
One pagination tag on the root page, pointing to the next page in series.
Two pagination tags on page 2.
Two pagination tags on page 3.
One pagination tag on page 4, the last page in the paginated series.
See our post about ecommerce pagination 2024 here
Small Business Dad 