Those who want to pursue SEO should learn what pagination is.  This is a topic which not everyone is familiar with but this is certainly something which people should learn about. Pagination can be a very big deal. It is just as important as faceted navigation but it can also be problematic, especially for someone who is not very familiar with the subject.

What are the best practices for SEO pagination?

The best practices for SEO pagination and they are the following:

  • Classic or non-index method
  • View all method
  • Rel prev/next method

Classic or non-index method

This technique indirectly transfers any equity from other pages to the primary page.  The other pages get crawled back to the canonical page and the equity is transferred as a second-order effect.

This method is not generally recommended for pagination nowadays for a variety of reasons but it is only beneficial for fringe cases. However, it is perfectly fine to use it and it will not do sites any damage, however, there are other better practices out there.

View all method

This is often considered as the most elegant and sometimes the best method of all. This approach has some prerequisites. It must load quickly and if the page is able to load progressively users will not have a bad experience. It is also important that all products and items are included on the component pages. This will help ensure that nothing is left out of the crawl.

The view all method has two benefits and they are:

  1. Users will love viewing all pages. Pages with products and items which are featured at once convert to much higher landing pages. However, it is important for page to load fast.
  2. All the other pages in the series transfer to View All their equities

Rel pre/next method

This is the newest technique in SEO pagination and for those who want a more detailed explanation of the method should go to Google’s support page for more information. It might be difficult for ecommerce sites to implement the view all method and this is where the next method comes in. This approach has many advantages and some of them are the following:

  1. All other pages share equity with the series. When a link is obtained by a 9-page series, equity is shared all across the series and across all pages.
  2. There is a self referencing rel canonical tag. Duplication is avoided.

Pagination recommendations

If you possess a fast loading View All page which contains products or items, the View All method is the best to use.  If you do not possess a quality View All or the company does not want to use this method, the rel nex/prev method is the next best option.

It is a must to remember that the classic method is not always the best for everyone so do not be afraid to look at other options before you make a decision.