Rel Next and Previous on Listing Pages of Blog
-
Hi,
Need to know does rel next and previous is more appropriate for content based articles and not blog listings.. Like an article spread across 3 pages - there it makes sense for rel next and previous as the content of the article is in series
However, for blog listing page, for pages 1, 2, 3, 4 where every page is unique as the blog has all independent listings or separate articles - does rel next and previous wont of much help
Our blog - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=latest&Itemid=91
This is what been said by the developer
"The whole idea of adding the "next" and "previous" tag in the header is only when your single blog post has permalinks like:
site.com/blog/entry/blog-post.html
site.com/blog/entry/blog-post.html?page=1
site.com/blog/entry/blog-post.html?page=2 "The link in the head is only applicable when your content is separated into multiple pages and it doesn't actually apply on listings. If you have a single blog post that is broken down to multiple pages, this is applicable and it works similarly like rel="canonical"
Can we safely ignore rel next and previous tag for this blog pagination for the listing pages !!
-
My gut feeling is that that's not really worth worrying about right now - 10 pages of paginated blog post summaries can easily be crawled and indexed and isn't going to dilute your index. Where we usually see problems on blogs is if you have a log of categories/sub-categories, including tags. Some sites with 100 articles end up with 300 pages of search results, because they have 50 tags, etc. That can end up looking thin fast. Ten pages of results is nothing, IMO.
-
Thanks Dr Peter for the insights
We were just wondering that - due to blog posts (96 articles) spread across 10 pages - does the listing rel next and previous should be applied on the pagination listing page.. With our current speed - may be we will additionally write 100 - 120 articles in a year
With your answer and recommendation and basis the current size of the blog along with future posts :-
-
we are ignoring the rel next and previous parameter for the blog
-
Neither are we applying any kind of noindex, follow too
Many thanks !!
-
-
Thanks Dr. Pete.
Just to clarify, I would typically not use rel/next prev on any sort keyword search result pages etc as I am keeping those totally out of the index. For my 2 cents, it is not just that they are thin, but they are a waste of time in helping Google find my deep content. You end up with potentially an infinite number of pages (due to the nature of kw queries) that are not worth the time to crawl. I have /search/ behind robots.txt for that matter. I depend more on other tools such as my XML sitemap and one set of paginated pages using rel=prev/next to help Google in discovering content.
We are testing rel=prev/next on one site I manage. I have about 3400 pages of content and over 130 paginated pages to let users and spiders browse the content in chronological order. Just a simple "browse our archives" type of pages. We set this up with prev/next and did not implement the noindex meta (based on the citations above). Overall we have not seen any negative effects from doing this. I would bet that if someone is using rel=next/prev on KW search results that could be resorted and filtered, that would cause the spiders to get confused.
Cheers!
-
While rel=prev/next was originally designed for paginated content, it is appropriate for search results as well. While you're right - they are technically unique - search results tend to have similar (or the same) title tags, similar templates, etc., and are often considered thin by Google.
Truthfully, the data on how well rel=prev/next works seems very mixed. I know mega-site SEOs who still haven't decided how they feel about it. Google's official advice is often conflicting, I've found, on this topic. As @CleverPHD said, Adam Audette has some good material on the subject.
It all comes down to scope. If your blog has a few dozen search pages, and hundreds of posts and other content, I wouldn't worry about it much. This is often more appropriate for e-commerce sites where search results may have filters and sorts and could spin out hundreds or thousands of URLs.
-
Hi Gagan,
I think Irving only suggested using noindex on the additional pages if those pages do not have any index value. As you mention, you feel they do have index value and so you do not want to use noindex on them. I would agree with that
There is an article by Adam Audette, that quotes Maile Ohye from Google
http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284
"However, using rel next/prev doesn’t prevent a component page from displaying in search results. So while these pages will “roll up” to the canonical (or default) page 1, they could still fire at search time if the query was relevant for that specific page.
At SMX West, Maile assured us that it would be a very rare thing for that situation to occur. But it could occur. Because of this, an additional recommendation (strictly as an optional step) is to add a robots noindex, follow to the rel prev/next component pages. This would ensure that component pages would never fire at search time."
More input from Maile Ohye
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/YbXqwoyooGM
Maile Ohye is responding to various questions on pagination.
"@TheDonald, @jerenel: If you've marked page 2 to n of your paginated series as "noindex, follow" to keep low quality content from affecting users and/or your site's rankings, that's fine, you can additionally include rel="next" and rel="prev." Noindex and rel="next"/"prev" are entirely independent annotations.
This means that if you add rel="next" and rel="prev" to noindex'd pages, it still signals to Google that the noindex'd pages are components of the series (though the noindex'd pages will not be returned in search results). This configuration is totally possible (and we'll honor it), but the benefit is mostly theoretical."
I think the key here is that if you have a section of your site that links to all of your blog postings and it is paginated, I would let Google crawl those, use rel next prev and do not use the noindex tag on pages 2-n. I always want to provide Google with a simple crawlable path of all of my content. But Google only needs that one path! Don't distract the Google! Any other versions of the path (i.e. re-sorts of the pagination based on date, or keyword search etc) I hide all of that from Google using noindex/nofollow or robots.txt where appropriate, as Google does not need to waste time browsing those duplicative pages.
Good luck!
-
Thanks, but why to noindex internal page as every page has unique listings. For rel previous and next - its more apt as a markup when content article is in sequence.
How about the blog listings - where there are listings only. Do you still feel that rel next and previous should be declared in header for blog listings. If yes - may give more reasons too specific to the blog
Also, for Panda Penalty - dint get you much on it .. Does the blog listing if not given markup invite a penalty from the search engines...
Many thanks
-
Your listing pages should definitely have the prev and next tags. These tags were created for pagination. There are other solutions on how deal with pagination, but this is the one that Google recommends . The bigger question for you is if you see value in Google indexing the listing pages and what possible landing page traffic you can expect from these pages. Without much index value, I would suggest adding a noindex, follow tag to your listing pages and avoid a potential Panda penalty.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to increase Page authority of old blog posts
Hi, How can I increase the page authority of old blog posts? There are many posts that are ranking well (Page 1 lower or Page 2) - but I want to make them rank higher by making the post more usable, better UI, design, content relaunches etc - these all would inherently mean improving Page authority also eventually. What are some concrete steps I can take to improve page authority of blog pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pks3331 -
How should I deal with this page?
Hey Mozzers, I was looking for a little guidance and advice regarding a couple of pages on my website. I have used 'shoes' for this example. I have the current structure Parent Category - Shoes Sub Categories - Blue Shoes
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP
Hard Shoes
Soft Shoes
Big Shoes etc Supporting Article - Different Types of Shoe and Their Uses There are about 12 subcategories in total - each one links back to the Parent Category with the keyword "Shoes". Every sub category has gone from ranking 50+ to 10-30th for its main keyword which is a good start and as I release supporting articles im sure each one will climb. I am happy with this. The Article ranks no1 for about 20 longtails terms around "different shoes". This page attracts around 60% of my websites traffic but we know this traffic will not convert as most are people and children looking for information only for educational purposes and are not looking to buy. Many are also looking for a type of product we dont sell. My issue is ranking for the primary category "Shoes" keyword. When i first made the changes we went from ranking nowhere to around 28th on the parent category page targeted at "Shoes". Whilst not fantastic this was good as gave us something to work off. However a few weeks later, the article page ranked 40th for this term and the main page dropped off the scale. Then another week some of the sub category pages ranked for it. And now none of my pages rank in the top 50 for it. I am fairly sure this is due to some cannibalisation - simply because of various pages ranking for it at different times.
I also think that additional content added by products on the sub category pages is giving them more content and making them rank better. The Page Itself
The Shoes page itself contains 400 good unique words, with the keyword mentioned 8 times including headings. There is an image at the top of the page with its title and alt text targeted towards the keyword. The 12 sub categories are linked to on the left navigation bar, and then again below the 400 words of content via a picture and text link. This added the keyword to the page another 18 or so times in the form of links to longtail subcaterogies. This could introduce a spam problem i guess but its in the form of nav bars or navigation tables and i understood this to be a necessary evil on eCommerce websites. There are no actual products linked from this page. - a problem? With all the basic SEO covered. All sub pages linking back to the parent category, the only solution I can think of is to add more content by Adding all shoes products to the shoe page as it currently only links out the the sub categories Merging the "Different Type of Shoe and Their Uses" article into the shoe page to make a super page and make the article pages less like to produce cannibalistic problems. However, by doing solution 2, I remove a page bringing in a lot of traffic. The traffic it brings in however is of very little use and inflates the bounce rate and lowers the conversion rate of my whole site by significant figures. It also distorts other useful reports to track my other progress. I hope i have explained well enough, thanks for sticking with me this far, i havn't posted links due to a reluctance by the company so hopefully my example will suffice. As always thanks for any input.0 -
Rel=Alternate on Paginated Pages
I've a question about setting up the rel=alternate & rel=canonical tags between desktop and a dedicated mobile site in specific regards to paginated pages. On the desktop and mobile site, all paginated pages have the rel=canonical set towards a single URL as per usual. On the desktop site though, should the rel=alternate be to the relevant paginated page on the mobile site (ie a different rel=alternate on every paginated page) or to a single URL just as it is vice versa. Cheers chaps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob1 -
We are switching our CMS local pages from a subdomain approach to a subfolder approach. What's the best way to handle this? Should we redirect every local subdomain page to its new subfolder page?
We are looking to create a new subfolder approach within our website versus our current subdomain approach. How should we go about handling this politely as to not lose everything we've worked on up to this point using the subdomain approach? Do we need to redirect every subdomain URL to the new subfolder page? Our current local pages subdomain set up: stores.websitename.com How we plan on adding our new local subfolder set-up: websitename.com/stores/state/city/storelocation Any and all help is appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO.CIC0 -
Questions Regarding Wordpress Blog Format, Categories and Tag pages...
I'm looking to make some optimizations to a website I'm working on but wanted more input before I get started: Currently, when blogs are posted to the website, the URL for each post looks like this:www.mywebsite.com/blogpost I've heard that for whatever reason, the best practice is to make sure that the blog posts get posted to a blog sub-directory like so: www.mywebsite.com/blog/blogpost If I were to make this change, I'm assuming I would have to 301 redirect all of the existing blogs to their new locations. Is this change worth doing and are there any other considerations I should be taking into account? Also, I'm aware that there are certain schools of thought that category and tag pages should be no-indexed to avoid duplicate content issues. Can anyone shed some light on this from first hand experience? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | goldbergweismancairo0 -
Ranking slipped to page 6 from page 1 over the weekend?
My site has been on page one for 2 phrases consistently from May onwards this year. The site has fewer than 100 backlinks and the link profile looks fairly even. On Friday we were on page 1, we even had a position 1, however now we are on page 6. Do you think this is Penguin or some strange Google blip? We have no webmaster tools messages at all. Thanks for any help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onlinechester0 -
Has anyone else seen a Google Plus Local listing displace a regular search listing?
I have a particular site that I have been working on for about eight months and had the site on Page 1 of Google search results for eight keywords (they are fairly small local-based keywords, so I'm really not trying to boast). Perhaps six weeks ago for two of the keywords we popped into the #2 position for Google Plus Local results. When this happened the site completely disappeared from the regular search results. A couple weeks later, the Google Plus Local listing was gone, and the site was back on Page 1 in the regular listings. This has gone back and forth several times, with either a very high Local result or a very high regular search result, but only one at a time. I suppose it would make sense for the same site to only be able to have one position on the front page at any given time, but my searches for info on this have been entirely fruitless. Has anyone else seen anything like this or have any thoughts? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IanKietzman271 -
Category Pages - Canonical, Robots.txt, Changing Page Attributes
A site has category pages as such: www.domain.com/category.html, www.domain.com/category-page2.html, etc... This is producing duplicate meta descriptions (page titles have page numbers in them so they are not duplicate). Below are the options that we've been thinking about: a. Keep meta descriptions the same except for adding a page number (this would keep internal juice flowing to products that are listed on subsequent pages). All pages have unique product listings. b. Use canonical tags on subsequent pages and point them back to the main category page. c. Robots.txt on subsequent pages. d. ? Options b and c will orphan or french fry some of our product pages. Any help on this would be much appreciated. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Troyville0