How to implement pagination correctly?

[mdsojolh43]

Google recently announced that they haven’t used rel=”next” and rel=”prev” in years and will no longer support it. This is one of the most commonly used tags to inform search engine crawlers that certain pages are paginated. While this has caused different reactions among SEOs, it has also highlighted the need to implement pagination correctly. To ensure that your site is implementing pagination correctly, it’s important to test your current implementation. That way, you’ll know what specifically needs to be fixed.

Testing your site for current pagination implementation
There are different types of tools in your pagination testing arsenal: “Inspect Element” to check the similarity of your paginated pages. Right-click to access the inspect element. CTRL F and type “canonical”. You should be able to see rel=”canonical” href=”the current page url”.



Tools to test if paginated pages are indexed
The Indexing Status report for your pages will be useful to tell you which paginated pages are indexed.

Tools to check paginated pages that compete for the same keywords
It is important for crawlers to be able to understand paginated pages related to particular keywords. This way, they are able to tell that these pages are related. Pi Datametrics is a great tool for this. After getting data on how your site currently implements pagination, you are now ready to troubleshoot the identified issues. Before we look at how to properly implement pagination on your site, we need to pause and look at the effects of Google’s announcements. If Google still supports rel=“prev/next”, the identified issues with pagination and SEO could be easily resolved with the help of noindex, meta tags, canonical tags, and proper implementation of on-page SEO. By stopping the use of rel=“next/prev” Google is now treating each paginated page as a standalone page by Google. Google is able to identify related pages even when directives like noindex and canonical tag are not used. If you have already used pagination on your site, there is no need to remove it. E-commerce sites or news sites have no choice but to continue using pagination. Here is how to properly implement pagination on your site:

The content of your paginated pages is unique and relevant
Google bots fetch content from different pages and then choose the one that is canonical. Therefore, you need to make sure that your paginated pages have unique content and that it is relevant to your ghana whatsapp data users. If a user wants to buy a particular product, the paginated product page should describe that product in detail to distinguish it from other paginated product pages. This means that even though the products may belong to the same category, their individual description on each page should be different.

Smart use of keywords
Sites will now need to use keywords in anchor text that link to higher-level pages. In our Oscar Hunt example, the paginated page could use a keyword such as Oxford in the anchor text to tell Google that the page is linked to the page with the higher link structure, “Shoes”: . It’s best to use variations of the same keyword to avoid cannibalization. This is where paginated pages compete for the same keyword. You’ll be doing your site a disservice as some pages will rank lower, which will lower your site’s ranking in search engine results.

Organize your items by priority
The elements on your paginated pages should be ranked according to their priority. This way, users will easily find the most popular content. Paginated pages with the most relevant content are only a few links away from the landing page. You will need a better link structure. Using a breadcrumb trail can also help.

Use URL parameters for paginated pages
URL parameters are used when the same content is displayed on different URLs to help search engines understand how they need to crawl your site. Here is an example of the links in the Oscar Hunt Shoe category:



The first URL is the accessories page where they list all the accessories sold on their website: