Pagination Help

[IceIcebaby]

Hi Moz Community, I've recently started helping a new site with their overall health and I have some pagination issues.

It's an ecommerce site and they currently don't have any pagination in place except for these tags:

1. Prev

2. 1

3. 2

4. 3

5. ...

6. 66

7. Next

I understand what these are doing (leading visitors to the previous, next or last page, but do these do anything for search crawlers or does the site need to have an option of:
1.rel=next/rel=prev
2.canonical leading to the view all page (the view all page takes a long time to load)

Thanks for your help.

-Reed

[IceIcebaby]

Thanks Marcus,

Your Answer is really helpful. I have read a few of the pagination articles and agree they all say you don't need it 100%, but I needed some extra help understanding the issue.

I think in this case no following secondary pages would be best because the content might look duplicated. When I do a inurl:dir site search I get back searchers indexing "high/low price" "most/least reviewed" etc. for products so that could be the issue there.

Again thanks for your in depth response to help clear up my issue.

-Reed

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Reed

This is one of those questions where it is all too easy to get lost in the technical implementation BUT we really have to focus on what is best for the user AND traffic from search engines.

Firstly to answer your questions:

1. Does the page need rel=next/prev - nope. It does not need it. Google will do a pretty good job in most cases. That said, if the paginated pages are largely duplicate then you could run into problems here. If they are highly unique and page 1 is better a better landing page for X where page 3 is a better landing page for Y then they may be just fine. Certainly, though in this instance, adding rel=next/prev will not hurt and will help Google better understand the series of pages. Really, it comes down to the content and the users.

2. Do you need a rel=canonical to the view all page. Nope again. It may not even be the right thing to do. If that page takes a long time to load (> 5 seconds) then it likely is not the best option here. Alternatively, if the view all does represent the best page for the search engine to index then... again it comes back to the best decision for your users.

--

Other options include noindexing the secondary pages, no following the pagination links for more efficient crawling and filtering page variables in webmaster tools. However, the right technical solution is the one that aligns with the needs of the business and sensible requirements regarding what is best for searchers.

The one point to note here is that we see a lot of badly put together pagination. Rel=next/prev which does not start or end properly (if at all), endless pagination of empty pages etc. Whatever solution you choose try to ensure it works and test thoroughly. Screamingfrog can be a big help here!

Ultimately, try to determine what is the best solution for your site users and then implement the technology solution that best meets your requirements.

Hope that helps!
Marcus

[sachin-sv]

Hey, I am sure you will find answers for all of your queries here- http://moz.com/ugc/seo-guide-to-google-webmaster-recommendations-for-pagination

Also, I would recommend you to read these articles-

http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html