Google is really starting to address some of the most common problems an SEO can face. The canonical tag was a massive help for webmasters who encountered duplicate content issues. It allowed a user to tag one URL as the master using rel=”canonical” href=”masterurl.html” and tag all duplicate versions of that page. This would help with PR leakage where multiple versions of the page could attract links, plus distributing your equity across a number of pages instead of just being conserved by one. For those on WordPress, Yoasts WordPress SEO plugin can do this automatically.
Well now Google is addressing another biggie (something I have dealt with countless times), it’s helping to stamp out Pagniation. Users can now include rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to give Google a hint that they should (from their blog post on this subject):
- Consolidate indexing properties, such as links, from the component pages/URLs to the series as a whole (i.e., links should not remain dispersed between page-1.html, page-2.html, etc., but be grouped with the sequence).
- Send users to the most relevant page/URL—typically the first page of the series.
Examples of where "next" and "prev" will be used
Image credit from Google Webmaster Blog
Example Implementation of Google rel=”next” and rel=”prev”
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4
On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1, you’d include in the
<head>section:
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2/>On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2:
<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1" />
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3" />On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3:
<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2" />
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4" />And on the last page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4:
<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3" />
Interestingly Google also released information on an exception to the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags, the view all results. Google have said studies have shown users prefer a page that shows all results from a certain series of articles. To surface your view-all results page over a component page you can simple use the canonical tag to point all component pages against the view-all results page. But for many sites there are going to be times when you don’t want to show a view-all results page ahead of a component page due to load time (showing a large page with all your results may cause high load times if image intensive) and of course conversion, longer pages containing multiple topics may not convert as well.
