Pagination has been a topic of debate for SEO community since the last year. As Google recently announced that “rel=prev/next” elements are no longer supported due to less usage, it left SEOs with many questions and confusions. As many misconceptions and issues related to pagination are still going around, here are some of the myth busters’ tips to properly optimize pagination for SEO and handle it efficiently.
Credit: https://ahrefs.com/blog/rel-prev-next-pagination/
But before jumping right into the discussion and strategies, let’s check some of these important questions that are most commonly in mind of every SEO enthusiast out there.
What is Pagination?
The process of dividing the content into several sub-pages is knows as Pagination. Mostly, its implementations are very useful in forum threads; series based blog posts, e-commerce websites for displaying products and showcasing gallery pictures. Generally, user is being taken from one page to another by this process and is used to enhance the UX.
Is it still beneficial in 2020?
Definitely, pagination is one of the most important aspects for the website not only because it provides more discoverability to your content, articles and products but also for laying out an efficient internal linking to your articles, services and products.
Therefore, without the pagination process and no internal linking, it will be difficult for Google bots to index those webpages. This will eventually lead to drop in the ranking of the site, making it very essential even nowadays for almost every kind of niches.
Misconceptions and myths
There have always been misconceptions about pagination practice that it can cause issues such as duplicate content along with crawling, indexing errors. It’s possible in these two scenarios:
Yes: If pagination is not properly optimized, it could create such errors.
No: If the pagination is done is an effective manner it can never lead to such issues.
How to have efficient and optimized pagination?
For all above reasons, it is essential to have a properly optimized pagination on your pages not only to bypass the penalties, but also to make good use of this feature and gain benefits from it for even future terms.
Here are our recommendations for proper pagination of the pages to get the max output and results.
- Tip 1 – The most common mistake made during this process is to use the “view all” section of the site which clubs all pages into a single URL along with the paginated pages.
Make sure to avoid this mistake to avoid getting marked as duplicate content. Additionally, make sure to use the best technical SEO pagination strategies to enhance the “rel=next/prev” as an attribute if the content of the page is too large to be contained in a single URL.
- Tip 2 – Make sure to optimize your On-Page elements and tweak them a bit by providing a proper page number in both your titles and H1 tags. For eg:
“Page 1 | Title | Company’s Name”
- Tip 3 – Even though, it was confirmed by John Mueller himself that it is safe to ignore the Google console’s warnings on duplicate meta description and titles as the content is different for the paginated pages.
However we would suggest keeping the Meta description and titles different to bypass any possibility of even a little bit of error.
- Tip 4 – Use the “No follow” tags on your paginated pages except you root page to restrict them from crawling. Additionally, you can also exempt the pages that are paginated from “XML” sitemap or make use of Robots.txt, to properly optimize the SEO pagination system.
- Tip 5 – As we all know “Content is the undisputed King of digital realm”. So make sure to produce rich and high quality content on your pages rather than filling them up with ads and spammy texts. Always remember to keep content distribution a lot higher than your display ads to sync in properly with search engine crawlers.
- Tip 6 – One of the most important aspect when it comes to pagination of pages are usage of “Anchor Text” and “Ahref attributes”. With both of these elements properly optimized and embedded, it’s always help crawling pages easily and efficiently for Search engine bots. Therefore, make sure to implement and define these two factors systematically and coherently.
- Tip 7 – Make sure to properly synch and optimize your “Canonical links” for productive indexing by search engine bots. Additionally, you can also make use of strategies such as allowing “view more” section or splitting the content into various pages effectively.
These were some of our key suggestions from our SEO team to optimize SEO pagination more productively and making use of it for providing better user experience in general. We would love to hear your thoughts and on enhancing pagination for SEO. Please share your suggestion and tips with us in the comment section below.