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">
Small Business Dad 