Pagination of sites and blogs, the strategy to avoid any mistake
The management of the pagination of a blog, and of a site more in general, is one of the most complex and relevant aspects of SEO work: in fact it concerns not only the way we “preserve” all the work done, but also the way we present our contents to Google.
Managing pagination
Pagination is the process that divides the published content into a series of pages and it is used to make more manageable entire lists of articles or products of a site. Sites such as eCommerce, online newspapers, forums and blogs make extensive use of this technique, which divides contents on multiple pages, rather than on one page.
One of the most used methods to create a hierarchy was rel = “next” and rel = “prev”, which lost part of its fame after Google announced it no longer follows this attribute as an indexing signal (even specifying that it is a system that can still be used if it works well for site users).
The issues of bad pagination
From a bad pagination can result some problems to the performance of the site in the Google Search, too, such as duplicated contents (in case of incorrect use of the canonical rel), contents of poor value (thin contents, when the contents of some pages are scarce or little valid, as in the case of articles subdivided in more pages or photo galleries), dilution of ranking signals (because the weight of the backlinks or the juice of the internal links are dispersed through the pages), waste of crawl budget (if all pages are left free for the Googlebot to scan them).
The site structure
In an ideal situation, the home page is the strongest page of our website, most likely the one that will receive the most links from other sites and the one that generally identifies our brand: from here depart all of the linked articles/categories, which are considered the absolutely most important contents, both from us (because otherwise we would obviously not have linked them, in the first place) and from Google.
To set a strategy for the contents view
This means that we need to study a strategy for the management of the display priority and the archiving of published contents, but in practice this strategy often does not exist and “we simply let the articles follow the standard work flow of CMS – such as WordPress, which shows them in chronological order from the most recent to the oldest one”.
On a SEO perspective, however, the contents should be shown not only in chronological order but also in order of importance for the position they occupy inside the site, starting from that of greater importance for the category and more searched by the users, both at specific times of the year and globally.
In order to have some kind of control over how Google will evaluate the website and the importance of the contents we need to reach the awareness that the site is constantly changing, that it is likely to be completely indeterminate and could take us up, if we get the right combination, but in most cases it will inevitably lead to continuous loss of traffic over time.
Highlighting useful articles
Google’s advice
In short, managing the structure and pagination of the site in an appropriate and strategic way is an extremely complex task, but it is also possible to do so with very rudimentary approaches, such as using tags or other techniques. In our support here it comes Google, too, with John Mueller who responded (briefly) on Twitter to a user who asked him for advice on the matter.
To be precise, the question of @LukeDaviesSEO was the following: “How can we handle the pagination of a blog (not an eCommerce, so no product pages) of over a thousand pages? It is a project that has been going on for eight years and we have not paid too much heed to SEO,” he adds. In the answering tweet, the Senior Webmaster trends analyst of Big G offers his quick point of view.
Use categories or tags to cross link so that you have a handful paginated pages per type, from where you link to the blog posts. Keep a good & balanced hierarchy, not too flat, not too deep.
— ? John ? (@JohnMu) February 29, 2020
Finding the right balance
Trying to extend the conversation, Mueller invites us then to find the right balance in the pagination, so to avoid burdening with thousands of pages to browse in order to search for contents: this solution helps users, but mostly Google (that, in the end, does not receive too many variants of paged pages) and Googlebot (which will not deeply scan each paged set).
