Video about pagination with rel=”next” and rel=”prev”

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

If you’re curious about the
rel="next" and rel=prev" for paginated content announcement
we made several months ago, we filmed a
video covering more of the basics of pagination
to help answer your questions. Paginated content includes things like an article that spans
several URLs/pages, or an e-commerce product category that spans multiple pages. With
rel="next" and rel="prev" markup, you can provide a strong hint to
Google that you would like us to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their
linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page. You can check out our
presentation for more information:

This video on pagination covers the basics of rel="next" and
rel="prev" and how it could be useful for your site.

Additional resources about pagination include:

• Webmaster Central Blog post announcing
  support of rel="next" and rel="prev"
• Webmaster Help Center article with more
  implementations of rel="next" and rel="prev"
• Webmaster Forum thread
  with our answers to the community’s in-depth questions, such as:

  • Does rel=next/prev also work as a signal for only one page of the series
    (page 1 in most cases?) to be included in the search index? Or would
    noindex tags need to be present on page 2 and on?

    When you implement rel="next" and rel="prev" on component
    pages of a series, we’ll then consolidate the indexing properties from the component
    pages and attempt to direct users to the most relevant page/URL. This is typically the
    first page. There’s no need to mark page 2 to n of the series with noindex
    unless you’re sure that you don’t want those pages to appear in search results.

  • Should I use the rel next/prev in the <head>
    section of a blog even if the two contents are not strictly correlated (but they are just
    time-sequential)?

    In regard to using rel="next" and rel="prev" for entries in
    your blog that “are not strictly correlated (but they are just time-sequential),”
    pagination markup likely isn’t the best use of your time—time-sequential pages
    aren’t nearly as helpful to our indexing process as semantically related content, such as
    pagination on component pages in an article or category. It’s fine if you include the
    markup on your time-sequential pages, but please note that it’s not the most helpful use
    case.

  • We operate a real estate rental website. Our files display results based on numerous
    parameters that affect the order and the specific results that display. Examples of
    such parameters are “page number”, “records per page”, “sorting” and “area
    selection”…

    It sounds like your real estate rental site encounters many of the same issues that
    e-commerce sites face… Here are some ideas on your situation:

    1. It’s great that you are using the Webmaster Tools URL parameters feature to more
       efficiently crawl your site.
    2. It’s possible that your site can form a rel="next" and
       rel="prev" sequence with no parameters (or with default parameter
       values). It’s also possible to form parallel pagination sequences when users select
       certain parameters, such as a sequence of pages where there are 15 records and a
       separate sequence when a user selects 30 records. Paginating component pages, even
       with parameters, helps us more accurately index your content.
    3. While it’s fine to set rel="canonical" from a component URL to a single
       view-all page, setting the canonical to the first page of a parameter-less sequence
       is considered improper usage. We make no promises to honor this implementation of
       rel="canonical" .

Remember that if you have paginated content, it’s fine to leave it as-is and not add
rel="next" and rel="prev" markup at all. But if you’re interested in
pagination markup as a strong hint for us to better understand your site, we hope these resources
help answer your questions!

Written by
Maile Ohye,
Developer Programs Tech Lead