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
-
Index, follow on a paginated page with a different rel=canonical URL
Hello, I have a question about meta robots ="index, follow" and rel=canonical on category page pagination. Should the sorted page be <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"></meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> since the rel="canonical" is pointing to a separate page that is different from the URL? Any thoughts on this topic would be awesome. Thanks. Main Category Page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice
https://www.site.com/category/
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"><link rel="canonical" href="https: www.site.com="" category="" "=""></link rel="canonical" href="https:></meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> Sorted Page
https://www.site.com/category/?p=2&dir=asc&order=name
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow"=""><link rel="canonical" href="https: www.site.com="" category="" ?p="2""></link rel="canonical" href="https:></meta name="robots" content="index,> As you can see, the meta robots is telling Google to index https://www.site.com/category/?p=2&dir=asc&order=name , yet saying the canonical page is https://www.site.com/category/?p=2 .0 -
Landing Page Drop Out
Hi, If a product page drops out of organic ranking, but you've made no changes is there a good place to start in order to find out why? I feel like it's almost impossible? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
Landing pages, are my pages competing?
If I have identified a keyword which generates income and when searched in google my homepage comes up ranked second, should I still create a landing page based on that keyword or will it compete with my homepage and cause it to rank lower?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | The_Great_Projects0 -
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs? I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site. Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Why does our business directions page rank above business profile page
Hi All, We are having an issue at the moment where our business direction page is ranking above the main business profile page. Our website is zodio.com, similar to Yelp but for South East Asia. An example of each page is below: Business Profile Page - http://www.zodio.com/business/detail/126037914/chowking Business Directions - http://www.zodio.com/business/direction/126037914 On many of our long tail searches for particular businesses, the business directions rank above the business details. Does anyone have any idea of why this would happen? I have researched Yelp and they do not have this issue. A few search examples in Google are as follows (one is in Thai): agonos dental clinic เวิลด์ชาร์มมิ่ง kawanku elektrik I have been rattling my brain and search for answers but cannot find anything. The communities help would be much appreciated. Many Thanks, Neil W
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zodiothailand0 -
Optimize the category page or a content page?
Hi, We wish to start ranking on a specific keyword ("log house prices" in italian). We have two options on what pages we should optimize for this keyword: A long content page (1000+ words with images) Log houses category page, optimized for the keyword (we have 50+ houses on this page, together with a short price summary). I would think that we have better chances with ranking with option nr.2 , but then we can't use that page for ranking with a more short-tail keyword (like "log houses"). What would you suggest? Is there maybe a third option for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohanMattisson0 -
Does a Single Instance of rel="nofollow" cause all instances on a page to be nofollowed?
I attended the Bruce Clay training at SMX Advanced Seattle, and he mentioned link pruning/sculpting (here's an SEOMoz article about it - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow) Now during his presentation he mentioned that if you have one page with multiple links leading to another page, and one of those links is nofollowed, it could cause all links to be nofollowed. Example: Page A has 4 links to Page B: 1:followed, 2:followed, 3:nofollowed, 4:followed The presence of a single nofollow tag would override the 3 followed links and none of them would pass link juice. Has anyone else encountered this problem, and Is there any evidence to support this? I'm thinking this would make a great experiment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brycebertola0 -
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