Pagination when not needed

[GPainter]

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!

[Devanur-Rafi]

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