Pagination: rel="next" rel="prev" in ?

[BeTheBoss]

With Google releasing that instructional on proper pagination I finally hunkered down and put in a site change request.

I wanted the rel="next" and rel="prev" implemented… and it took two weeks for the guy to get it done. Brutal and painful.

When I looked at the source it turned out he put it in the body above the pagination links… which is not what I wanted. I wanted them in the .

Before I respond to get it properly implemented I want a few opinions - is it okay to have the rel="next" in the body? Or is it pretty much mandatory to put it in the head?

(Normally, if I had full control over this site, I would just do it myself in 2 minutes… unfortunately I don't have that luxury with this site)

[Matthew_Edgar]

It does need to be in the head tag. I was in a similar situation on another site where the rel next/prev was put in the . We saw no results from it (in terms of pages indexed) but as soon as those were moved back to the , life was good.

If you need documentation proof for your change request (which I was asked for!), these might help:

Google's blog post about this says "rel=”next” and rel=”prev” only need to be declared within the  section, not within the document ."

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

At a more basic level, the tag only works in the . See the "Tips & Notes" section.

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_link.asp

[rhutchings]

Matthew is spot on here.  Has to be in the head or it wont work properly.  All the rel/link tags exist in the head (same with rel=canonical, etc...)

[BeTheBoss]

Ah thanks for that Matthew! You gave me exactly what I needed for my email…

Now to wait another two weeks for this web developer. (beyond frustrating)

[beck398]

Guys I have just joined seo moz and I ended up with 3600 crawl errors and after speaking with abe from seo moz  it soon became clear it was to do with the on page pagination we then asked our developer to add rel=”next” & rel=”prev” Within a few minutes my rankings on certain keywords started to drop some ranking on page 1 in the top 5 have now dropped out of the top 50.

I'm a retailer with a certain amount of knowledge regarding seo but this stuff im completely puzzled could anyone help. my site is www.maximumsports-nutrition.com

Cheers

Andy