Google’s New Way Of Dealing With Pagination

While at SMX East a few weeks ago, I had attended one of the seminar tracks in which the “experts” talked about handling pagination. The big announcement was made by Google. Google has been focused on the pagination of content, or content that spans more than one page. Google’s mission is to make all the information available on one page when a user searches for it.

Google now has the ability to analyze pages that are setup in this way and automatically combine it. If you’d like to make Google’s job easier, they’ve suggested a few ways to help.

First, if you have a view all page that your paginated content leads to, Google recommends the use of the ”rel=canonical” tag and have the subpages point towards your view all page. This helps Google recognize the page structure making it easier for them to create a page with all the content visible.

Google also suggests that you use ”rel=prev” or ”rel=next” to point to the previous or next pages in a series of paginated content. This can be combined with the”rel=canonical” tag to create an even smoother experience for Google as well as users.

If you or your users prefer a paginated view, or maybe your view all page takes a really long time to load, you can keep this setup by using a ”noindex” tag.

Google has also stated that if you’re feeling too lazy or too busy, that’s cool too, because they officially are working on doing it all themselves anyhow. However, when you correctly apply the above tags to your site then you leave nothing up to interpretation as they’re working the bugs out. Plus, you get the benefit of this update sooner rather than later.

One of the big things that the Google representative did talk about is “user experience” and page load times as they (Google) looks to keep load times to 1/2 of a second as their benchmark.  It is important to understand the undertones that are being sent by these representatives and this was one that they were really saying loud and clear.  If your “view all” page takes to long to load then it is not going to be right tactic for you to use.