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When Google announced that it no longer supported the rel=next/prev tag attribute , many sites have changed their approach to pagination, which has not always led to positive results. In this article we will figure out what exactly has changed and how you really should set up pagination for effective indexing.
The rel=next/prev attribute was used to indicate the order in which pages are linked to each other within the pagination. Its job was to help Google combine indexing factors across all pages and select the most relevant one to display in search results. This was usually the first page of a series.
Pagination is used to divide content into several parts and create numbered pages, such as on blog pages, forums, or product listings.
Let's see what it looked like in -code:
The first page used the rel="next" attribute, which only links to the next page.
The second page links to the first and third pages using the rel="prev" and rel="next" attributes respectively.
The third page points only to the previous one, that is, to the second.
However, this year Google decided to remove support for rel=next/prev as users preferred single-page solutions. It is noteworthy that at the time of the announcement, Google had long ignored this attribute.
Despite these changes, nothing has changed for SEO: Google continues to effectively index paginated pages, even without using rel=next/prev, and still selects the most relevant page in the series.
Google has probably abandoned the use of the rel=next/prev attribute since it can successfully index a series of pages without it. To do this, search engines use:
Additionally, pagination can make navigation difficult for users if it is not needed to make the content easier to view. In some cases, it is used solely to increase page views or advertisements, which can degrade the user experience.
The answer is no. If pagination using rel=next/prev is already configured on your site, you should not remove this attribute. Moreover, WC3 continues to recommend using this markup for series of pages. Some search engines, such as Bing, still take the attribute into account when indexing (unlike Yandex, which ignores it).
If you use pagination, it is recommended to mark each URL in the series as canonical using rel="canonical". That is, each page points to itself as the main option, and not to the first page in the block. If this is exactly what you have already implemented, leave everything as is. It is important to treat all URLs in a series as normal indexable pages.
For example, for the second page website.com/page/2 the canonical link would look like this:
Another option is to provide a canonical link to a page that contains all the content from multiple pagination pages. This will provide a better user experience as pagination is available, but the indexed version of the document will include all the content in the series.
If you need help setting up pagination on your website or other questions about SEO, write to the SEO studio "SEO COMPUTER" by email info@seo.computer.
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