Many websites contain paginated content. If you do not handle it correctly, you may miss some SEO value. In this article, I am going to walk you through the best SEO practice for pagination.
Side effects of paginated content
There are several negative side effects of paginated content.
If your article is divided into three pages, Google may treat it them as separated page and rank them for different keywords. Links or anchor texts may pass less value as it should be.
If you do not markup your paginated pages, Google may crawl your site in an orderly fashion. For example, Google bots may start to crawl on page 10 of your Paget content and they have no idea that the series of content is related. Which means, searchers might be sent to a different page that is less relevant.
Your job, as a webmaster, is to help Google better understand and index your site’s content.
Best SEO practice for paginated pages
To help Google understand paginated content, you can use markup rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to indicate the relationship among a series of pages. With these tags, Google knows it and can show the most relevant page in the series.
How to set this up?
For example, your content is divided into 4 pages. You should add the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” in the head section of each of these pages.
Part-1 of the paginated pages, add this tag:
<link rel=”next” href=” https://yourdomain/article-part-2″ />
For part-2 add the following:
<link rel=”prev” href=” https://yourdomain/article-part-1″ />
<link rel=”next” href=” https://yourdomain/article-part-3″ />
Should you canonicalize all pages in the series to the first page?
No, you should not. The canonical tag is for duplicated content, not paginated content. If all canonical tags point to the first page, Google will only index the first page and see other pages in the series as duplicated content.
The canonical tag should point to the exact URL of the page. So the part-2 page’s canonical tag should be like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=” https://yourdomain/article-part-2″ />
Can you use the same description on the paginated pages?
Yes, you can. Almost all the websites have paginated content and Google knows it, especially when you have the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tag setup. You may see duplicated description issue in Google Search Console, but you can simply ignore it.
Another method
Google believes that searchers prefer to view all the information altogether. In that case, you can include a view all page. You can simply add a rel=canonical tag linking to the view all page on all of the Paginated pages to tell Google that the view all version is the one that you want to appear in search results.
Not so recommended method
To avoid duplicated content issue and the paginated pages are low quality, then you can add a noindex tag to every page in the head section. In order to retain the link value,
you want to also include the follow tag because this means of the page authority will travel into the individual destination pages all throughout that series of pages. If you do not include the follow tag, Google by default will follow the links on these pages.
Even though the entire list is removed from the index, these pages will also pass link value.
Why is this method not recommended? Long term noindex pages will eventually lose link value. If your paginated content does have valuable data, you should not use the noindex tag.
Note: Never add this to your robots.txt file because in that case google wouldn’t crawl it all together.
Conclusion
It is pretty clear that SEO best practice for pagination is to use rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tag. In this way, you will get the most SEO value, because all your pages are indexed and Google will not see this as duplicated content issue or low quality.
