Pagination when not needed
-
Hello Moz,
Odd one for you today. I've a site with has pagination (rel= next / prev) however its not being used correctly.
I'll give you some examples: lets assume its a 5 page site with a home page, about us etc.
The home page has a rel="next" tag on it leading to the next tab (about us) this goes all the way down to the final tag (contact us).
Normally you use these tags for pages e.g page 1 - 5 but how much will they affect being used in the way above I'm thinking site structure. Just to add there is no view all on it either though this would make no sense in the way it is being used.
Normally I would remove but the client wants to know why and I wanted to articulate better then "because its wrong"
As always Moz - thanks!
-
Hi Chris,
Frankly, don't have a perfect answer to the situation but, its just not the purpose that pagination exists for.
You go in for pagination under the following scenarios if you wish all your paginated content to appear in the search results: (Taken from Google): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en
1. News and/or publishing sites often divide a long article into several shorter pages.
2. Retail sites may divide the list of items in a large product category into multiple pages.
3. Discussion forums often break threads into sequential URLs.Moreover, the pagination mark-up provides a strong hint to Google that you would like them to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page. This would not be the desired outcome in your client's case Chris. So, you can convince them not to implement the pagination mark-up for generic top-level navigation pages as these pages should rank individually for respective search terms if any and they are definitely not the part of any logical sequence and this defies the very purpose behind paginated content. Those were my two cents friend. Good luck.
Best regards,
Devanur Rafi
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
-
Need Advice on Categorizing Posts, Using Topics, Site Navigation & Structure
Hey there, My site had terrible categorization. I did a redesign, and essentially decided to start over using Topics instead of categories - which appear as my site's main navigation. Now I need to assign a Topic to all my posts. Is it safe to assign posts to multiple parent Topics from an SEO point of view? I want to do it since it would be helpful for users to find them in multiple locations some of the time, but I certainly don't want any SEO issues. Also, should I de-categorize all of my posts since I'm assigning them to my new hierarchical taxonomy - Topics? This is very important to finalize. Any help or advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Mike
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Href lang issues - help needed!
Hi, I have an issue with Google indexing the US version of our website rather than the UK version on Google.co.uk. I have added hreflang tags to both sites (https://www.pacapod.com/ and https://us.pacapod.com/), have updated and submitted an XML sitemap for each website and checked that the country targeting in search console is set-up correctly but Google are still indexing the wrong website. I would be grateful for any assistance with this issue. Many thanks Eddie
Technical SEO | | mypetgiftbox0 -
How similar do pages need to be to utilize the canonical tag
One of my pages is a help and questions page about completing a conversions and the other is the actual campaign landing page. They are both ranking for the same term. While the subject of both pages is similar the content is not. Is the rel canonical tag appropriate here?
Technical SEO | | cbarron0 -
Need better solution for 301s with Jekyll/S3 Site
Hey Mozzers, So, this isn't the first time that I've come to the community with questions regarding my new site. Although running a site using static HTML-generated pages has been fantastic in the first few weeks as far as load times, it's been a nightmare in terms of a few other SEO-related concerns, namely redirects. In the Q&A post above, Mat Shepherd pointed out a solution for adding 301s to an Amazon Webservices site using their "Redirection Rules" field on the "Configure Bucket for Website Hosting" page. However, I discovered soon after that I was limited to only 50 redirects using this method. Obviously, all things considered, this will not be enough. At this point, I'm basically out of ideas. If anyone else out there has a website with a similar setup, (Jekyll platform hosted on Amazon S3,) that has overcome this problem with redirects, I'd really appreciate hearing from you. Thanks in advance, everyone
Technical SEO | | danny.wood0 -
I'm thinking I might need to canonicalize back to the home site and combine some content, what do you think?
I have a site that is mostly just podcasts with transcripts, and it has both audio and video versions of the podcasts. I also have a blog that I contribute to that links back to the video/transcript page of these podcasts. So this blog I contribute to has the exact same content (the podcast; both audio and video but no transcript) and then an audio and video version of this podcast. Each post of the podcast has different content on it that is technically unique but I'm not sure it's unique enough. So my question is, should I canonicalize the posts on this blog back to the original video/transcript page of the podcast and then combine the video with the audio posts. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ThridHour0 -
Duplicate Content Due to Pagination
Recently our newly designed website has been suffering from a rankings loss. While I am sure there are a number of factors involved, I'd like to no if this scenario could be harmful... Google is showing a number of duplicate content issues within Webmaster Tools. Some of what I am seeing is duplicate Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions for page 1 and page 2 of some of my product category pages. So if a category has many products and has 4 pages, it is effectively showing the same page title and meta desc. across all 4 pages. I am wondering if I should let my site show, say 150 products per page to get them all on one page instead of the current 36 per page. I use the Big Commerce platform. Thank you for taking the time to read my question!
Technical SEO | | josh3300 -
What changes do i need to make to my site to get into google news
Hi, when we had the old design, we were in google news but then when we upgraded our site, we had a major problem which forced us to have to redesign our site. Since then we have not been included in google news and we would like to get back in. We only want to be in google news for the following page http://www.in2town.co.uk/Latest-News-Headlines But for some reason, no matter what we do we keep getting knocked back. I would love to know what we should be doing to get into google news and see what the problems are. We have moved to a bigger dedicated server to increase speed so i know it is not that. Any help would be great Also is there an alternative to google news that i can get our site into to generate traffic and to get our news stories straight out to people Hi, Thank you for your note. We appreciate your interest in sharing your content with us. However, when we reviewed your site, we found that we cannot include it in Google News at this time. We have certain guidelines in place regarding the quality of sites which are included in Google News. Please feel free to review these guidelines at the following link: http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40787 We know it can be frustrating to not have more information about this but we appreciate your efforts and understanding. We will log your site for future consideration. Please keep in mind that we will be unlikely to review your site for at least 60 days following this email. Thanks for your understanding and your continued interest in Google News. Regards,
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
The Google News Team0 -
I need help to define which is the best friendly url structure
Hi, I need some help to define which is the best friendly url structure for my new project, I'm in doubt for some cases, anyone could help me define which would be the best way? domain.com/buy-online/0-1,this-cool-model or
Technical SEO | | LeonardoLima
domain.com/buy-online/this-cool-model,0-1 or
domain.com/buy-online/0-1/this-cool-model or
domain.com/buy-online/this-cool-model/0-1 or
domain.com/buy-online/this-cool-model_0-1 or
domain.com/buy-online/this-cool-model?Model=0&OtherParam=1 Thanks! Best Regards,
Leonardo Lima0