Make SEO and pagination go together. A full guide of the options you have to deal with the pagination problem.

1. pagination
rel=”next” rel=”prev”
Menachem Rosenbaum
http://luckyboost.com
@luckyboost
1 <link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/2”>
http://luckyboost.com

2. What is the problem?
Search engines see pagination as separate
entities, searchers might be sent to a different
page that might not be the most relevant.
links and anchor text, can be diluted into the
different component URLs rather than being
consolidated to the one article or to the one
product category.
2 <link rel=“prev” href=“pagination-guide/”>
<link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/3”>
http://luckyboost.com

3. Where is the problem?
Article divided into several component pages
Forum thread divided into a sequence of
URLs
Product category with items spread across
several pages
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<link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/4”>
http://luckyboost.com

4. How to deal with the problem?
<meta name=“robots” content =“noindex,
follow”> - allows crawling but not indexing
rel=”canonical” - acts a strong hint for
duplicate content
rel=”next” and rel=”prev” - indicate the
relationship between component URLs in a
paginated series
4 <link rel=“prev” href=“pagination-guide/3”>
<link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/5”>
http://luckyboost.com

5. Article divided into several components
+ noindex, follow
Article Article Article
Page 1/3 Page 2/3 Page 3/3
content =“noindex, follow” content =“noindex, follow”
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<link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/6”>
http://luckyboost.com

6. Article divided into several components
+ noindex, follow
Article
Page 1/3
 SE can see only page 1
 SE will only return page 1
No control over inbounded seo
6 <link rel=“prev” href=“pagination-guide/5”>
<link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/7”>
http://luckyboost.com

7. Article divided into several components
+ canonical
Article
Page 1/3
rel=“canonical“ href=“page 1/3” rel=“canonical“ href=“page 1/3”
Article Article
Page 2/3 Page 3/3
7 <link rel=“prev” href=“pagination-guide/6”>
<link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/8”>
http://luckyboost.com

8. Article divided into several components
+ canonical
Article
Article
Page 1/3 Article
Page 2/3
Page 3/3
 SE can see all page
 SE will most probably return only page 1
Partial control over inbounded seo (all goes to page 1)
8 <link rel=“prev” href=“pagination-guide/7”>
<link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/9”>
http://luckyboost.com

9. Article divided into several components
+ rel="next“ and rel="prev"
rel=“prev" href=“page 1/3” rel=“prev" href=“page 2/3”
Article Article Article
Page 1/3 Page 2/3 Page 3/3
rel="next" href=“page 2/3” rel=“next" href=“page 3/3”
9 <link rel=“prev” href=“pagination-guide/8”>
<link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/10”>
http://luckyboost.com

10. Article divided into several components
+ rel="next“ and rel="prev"
Article
Article
Article
Page 1/3
Page 2/3
Page 3/3
 SE can see all pages
 SE can return all pages most probably page 1
 Most control over inbounded seo
10 <link rel=“prev” href=“pagination-guide/9”>
<link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/11”>
http://luckyboost.com

11. rel="next“ and rel="prev“ + canonical
View all page
category
category all
category
category
Page 1/3
Page 2/3
Page 3/3
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<link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/12”>
http://luckyboost.com

12. rel="next" and rel="prev“
with parameters and canonical
URL: http://mysite.com/category/2?sort=popular
<link rel=”canonical” href=“http://mysite.com/category/2”>
<link rel=“prev” href=“http://mysite.com/category?sort=popular”>
<link rel=“next” href=“http://mysite.com/category/3?sort=popular”>
URL: http://mysite.com/category/subcategory/2?sort=price
<link rel=”canonical” href=http://mysite.com/category/subcategory/2>
<link rel=“prev” href=“http://mysite.com/category/subcategory?sort=price”>
<link rel=“next” href=“http://mysite.com/category/subcategory/3?sort=price”>
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<link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/13”>
http://luckyboost.com

13. Rules for rel="next“ and rel="prev"
1. The chain can’t be broken
2. Each url can be in only one pagination
chain
3. The pagination attributes can only link
together URLs with matching parameters
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<link rel=“next” href=“pagination-guide/14”>
http://luckyboost.com

14. Thank you
Menachem Rosenbaum
menachem@luckyboost.com
http://luckyboost.com
Find presentation and more explanation at
http://bit.ly/paginate
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http://luckyboost.com