How do you handle pagination for SEO?
How you organise your content is important to search engine optimisation (SEO), whether you are writing a new blog post, adding a new page to your website, or updating your ecommerce website. When you organise your content properly, you improve user experience (UX), ensuring you website visitors, along with search engines, can find information on your site with ease.
Pagination is the numbering of a websites pages in an ascending order. It comes in handy when you want to split your content across a number of pages, showing extensive data in easy to manage pieces. Sites with a large collection of content, such as blogs, news sites, and ecommerce websites, may require numerous pages, making navigation easier, and improving user experience (UX).
Numbering is placed at either the top or the bottom of the web pages, enabling users to move from one group of links to the next.
When you split information across a number of pages, it improves your website's usability. While it is beneficial, it must be implemented property. This is what determines if your important content will be crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engines.
Search engines focus on showing their users the most relevant and informative results, displaying them at the top of search results. There are many criteria taken into consideration to evaluable a website usability. This includes content quality, where pagination plays a role:
In order for your website pages to appear in SERPs, you need to think about how search engine crawlers crawl and index your pages:
There are a few things you can do to ensure that search engine understand your paginated content is not duplicated, helping you improve your ranking in SERPs:
Optimise all paginated URLs according to SEO best practices. Paginated content should be unique and establish a connection between the URLs, helping crawlers identify how you want them indexed and displayed.
Another way to handle pagination for SEO is to canonicalise the View All page. This will allow all blog posts, product pages, comments, and more to be displayed. This does require adding a canonical link to point to view all page to each of your paginated URLs.
Canonical links are signals used to advise search engines to consider a page for indexing.
As mentioned above, in order for pagination to help your SEO efforts, it must be done properly. Some common pagination issues include:
Tips to Handling Pagination for SEO
1. Each page must have a unique URL
In order for Google to treat your URLs as distinct, when in a paginated sequence, you will want to use URL nesting. Do not use URL fragment identifying for page numbers, as Google tends to ignore them, not seeing them as the text following a character.
2. Link Paginated URLs Together
In order to ensure that the search engines understand the relationship between your paginated content, you must include a link from each page to the next page. Also add a link on each page in a group, returning back to the first page. This helps Google identify which page remains the main page.
3. Pages Must be Canonical
Specify the canonical attribute in the tag of each page, adding a link pointing to the page to make each of your website pages canonical.
4. On-Page SEO
To reduce the risk of warnings in Google Search Console, or other tools, you may want to de-optimise your paginated page H1 tags, adding useful text and category images to the root page. You will want to carry out a complete on-page SEO audit, identifying issues that may be stopping you from climbing to the top of search engine results.
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