Hi Guys,
One of our sites has an extensive number category page lsitings, so we implemented the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags for these pages (as suggested by Google below), However, we still see duplicate meta data errors in SEOMoz crawl reports and also in Google webmaster tools. Does the SEOMoz crawl tool test for the correct use of rel="next" and "prev" tags and not list meta data errors, if the tags are correctly implemented?
Or, is it necessary to still use unique meta titles and meta descriptions on every page, even though we are using the rel="next" and "prev" tags, as recommended by Google?
Thanks, George
Implementing rel=”next” and rel=”prev”
If you prefer option 3 (above) for your site, let’s get started! Let’s say you have content paginated into the URLs:
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4
On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1, you’d include in the section:
On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2:
On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3:
And on the last page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4:
A few points to mention:
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The first page only contains rel=”next” and no rel=”prev” markup.
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Pages two to the second-to-last page should be doubly-linked with both rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup.
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The last page only contains markup for rel=”prev”, not rel=”next”.
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rel=”next” and rel=”prev” values can be either relative or absolute URLs (as allowed by the tag). And, if you include a
<base>link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL. -
rel=”next” and rel=”prev” only need to be declared within the section, not within the document .
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We allow rel=”previous” as a syntactic variant of rel=”prev” links.
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rel="next" and rel="previous" on the one hand and rel="canonical" on the other constitute independent concepts. Both declarations can be included in the same page. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain:
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rel=”prev” and rel=”next” act as hints to Google, not absolute directives.
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When implemented incorrectly, such as omitting an expected rel="prev" or rel="next" designation in the series, we'll continue to index the page(s), and rely on our own heuristics to understand your content.
