Rel Next and Previous on Listing Pages of Blog

[Modi]

Hi,

Need to know does rel next and previous is more appropriate for content based articles and not blog listings.. Like an article spread across 3 pages - there it makes sense for rel next and previous as the content of the article is in series

However, for blog listing page, for pages 1, 2, 3, 4 where every page is unique as the blog has all independent listings or separate articles - does rel next and previous wont of much help

Our blog - http://www.mycarhelpline.com/index.php?option=com_easyblog&view=latest&Itemid=91

This is what been said by the developer

"The whole idea of adding the "next" and "previous" tag in the header is only when your single blog post has permalinks like:

site.com/blog/entry/blog-post.html
site.com/blog/entry/blog-post.html?page=1
site.com/blog/entry/blog-post.html?page=2 "

The link in the head is only applicable when your content is separated into multiple pages and it doesn't actually apply on listings. If you have a single blog post that is broken down to multiple pages, this is applicable and it works similarly like rel="canonical"

Can we safely ignore rel next and previous tag for this blog pagination for the listing pages !!

[irvingw]

Your listing pages should definitely have the prev and next tags. These tags were created for pagination. There are other solutions on how deal with pagination, but this is the one that Google recommends .  The bigger question for you is if you see value in Google indexing the listing pages and what possible landing page traffic you can expect from these pages. Without much index value, I would suggest adding a noindex, follow tag to your listing pages and avoid a potential Panda penalty.

[Modi]

Thanks, but why to noindex internal page as every page has unique listings. For rel previous and next - its more apt as a markup when content article is in sequence.

How about the blog listings - where there are listings only. Do you still feel that rel next and previous should be declared in header for blog listings. If yes - may give more reasons too specific to the blog

Also, for Panda Penalty - dint get you much on it .. Does the blog listing if not given markup invite a penalty from the search engines...

Many thanks

[CleverPhD]

Hi Gagan,

I think Irving only suggested using noindex on the additional pages if those pages do not have any index value.  As you mention, you feel they do have index value and so you do not want to use noindex on them.  I would agree with that

There is an article by Adam Audette, that quotes Maile Ohye from Google

http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284

"However, using rel next/prev doesn’t prevent a component page from displaying in search results. So while these pages will “roll up” to the canonical (or default) page 1, they could still fire at search time if the query was relevant for that specific page.

At SMX West, Maile assured us that it would be a very rare thing for that situation to occur. But it could occur. Because of this, an additional recommendation (strictly as an optional step) is to add a robots noindex, follow to the rel prev/next component pages. This would ensure that component pages would never fire at search time."

More input from Maile Ohye

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/YbXqwoyooGM

Maile Ohye is responding to various questions on pagination.

"@TheDonald, @jerenel: If you've marked page 2 to n of your paginated series as "noindex, follow" to keep low quality content from affecting users and/or your site's rankings, that's fine, you can additionally include rel="next" and rel="prev." Noindex and rel="next"/"prev" are entirely independent annotations.

This means that if you add rel="next" and rel="prev" to noindex'd pages, it still signals to Google that the noindex'd pages are components of the series (though the noindex'd pages will not be returned in search results). This configuration is totally possible (and we'll honor it), but the benefit is mostly theoretical."

I think the key here is that if you have a section of your site  that links to all of your blog postings and it is paginated, I would let Google crawl those, use rel next prev and do not use the noindex tag on pages 2-n.   I always want to provide Google with a simple crawlable path of all of my content.   But Google only needs that one path!  Don't distract the Google!  Any other versions of the path (i.e. re-sorts of the pagination based on date, or keyword search etc) I hide all of that from Google using noindex/nofollow or robots.txt where appropriate, as Google does not need to waste time browsing those duplicative pages.

Good luck!

[Dr-Pete]

While rel=prev/next was originally designed for paginated content, it is appropriate for search results as well. While you're right - they are technically unique - search results tend to have similar (or the same) title tags, similar templates, etc., and are often considered thin by Google.

Truthfully, the data on how well rel=prev/next works seems very mixed. I know mega-site SEOs who still haven't decided how they feel about it. Google's official advice is often conflicting, I've found, on this topic. As @CleverPHD said, Adam Audette has some good material on the subject.

It all comes down to scope. If your blog has a few dozen search pages, and hundreds of posts and other content, I wouldn't worry about it much. This is often more appropriate for e-commerce sites where search results may have filters and sorts and could spin out hundreds or thousands of URLs.

[CleverPhD]

Thanks Dr. Pete.

Just to clarify, I would typically not use rel/next prev on any sort keyword search result pages etc as I am keeping those totally out of the index.   For my 2 cents, it is not just that they are thin, but they are a waste of time in helping Google find my deep content.  You end up with potentially an infinite number of pages (due to the nature of kw queries) that are not worth the time to crawl.  I have /search/ behind robots.txt for that matter.   I depend more on other tools such as my XML sitemap and one set of paginated pages using rel=prev/next to help Google in discovering content.

We are testing rel=prev/next on one site I manage.  I have about 3400 pages of content and over 130 paginated pages to let users and spiders browse the content in chronological order. Just a simple "browse our archives" type of pages.   We set this up with prev/next and did not implement the noindex meta (based on the citations above).  Overall we have not seen any negative effects from doing this.    I would bet that if someone is using rel=next/prev on KW  search results that could be resorted and filtered, that would cause the spiders to get confused.

Cheers!

[Modi]

Thanks Dr Peter for the insights

We were just wondering that - due to blog posts (96 articles) spread across 10 pages - does the listing rel next and previous should be applied on the pagination listing page.. With our current speed - may be we will additionally write 100 - 120 articles in a year

With your answer and recommendation and basis the current size of the blog along with future posts :-

• we are ignoring the rel next and previous parameter for the blog

• Neither are we applying any kind of noindex, follow too

Many thanks !!

[Dr-Pete]

My gut feeling is that that's not really worth worrying about right now - 10 pages of paginated blog post summaries can easily be crawled and indexed and isn't going to dilute your index. Where we usually see problems on blogs is if you have a log of categories/sub-categories, including tags. Some sites with 100 articles end up with 300 pages of search results, because they have 50 tags, etc. That can end up looking thin fast. Ten pages of results is nothing, IMO.