Pagination rel="next" "prev" ...best use for articles?

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Pagination rel="next" "prev" ...best use for articles?

peego

12:19 am on Nov 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

I was wondering for multiple part articles, should we use rel="next" and "prev" for google?

So if I had:
article1.htm
article2.htm

Would this be correct implementation?

In article1.htm <head></head> section, I would add:

<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.example.com/article2.htm />

In article2.htm <head></head> section, I would add:

<link rel=”prev” href=”http://www.example.com/article1.htm />
<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.example.com/article3.htm /> <<== if I had a 3rd part.

TIA!

phranque

1:35 am on Nov 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

these would all be useful for linking a collection of documents:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links

Start Refers to the first document in a collection of documents. This link type tells search engines which document is considered by the author to be the starting point of the collection.
Next Refers to the next document in a linear sequence of documents. User agents may choose to preload the "next" document, to reduce the perceived load time.
Prev Refers to the previous document in an ordered series of documents. Some user agents also support the synonym "Previous".
Contents Refers to a document serving as a table of contents. Some user agents also support the synonym ToC (from "Table of Contents").
Index Refers to a document providing an index for the current document.

menntarra 34

2:10 am on Nov 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

That's a good question, if i search for for example "apple" , and the result page has pagination, so that we can navigate between these articles (about "apple"). Only the newer are on the first page. So in this case rel="next" and rel="prev" or instead the rel canonical is better, which would of course would point at the first page?

I read somewhere that it is okay if we use rel="next" and rel="prev" if the other pages contain additional information about that topic, but i'm still not sure about the best usage in these situations.

peego

3:08 am on Nov 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

my pages are about 1 topic, but it gets a little long so I split it up into 2 pages.

So should I use the <link rel="next"...> as mentioned above? How does everyone here handle their long articles broken into sequential pages about the same topic?

klark0

3:43 am on Nov 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

Personally ..

I do rel=next/rel=prev,

IF it's truly a single article broken into multiple pages like
domain.com/new-widget-article.html - New Widget Article
domain.com/new-widget-article-2.html - New Widget Article - Page 2
domain.com/new-widget-article-3.html - New Widget Article - Page 3

If it's a series of related articles on the same topic, (with different titles), then I don't do rel=next/rel=prev. In the first instance, Google consolidates the entire three pages into one. (usually the first in the series). You generally don't want that happening with a series of articles with sufficiently different titles.

menntarra 34

11:29 am on Nov 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

@peego: actually your usage is THE suggested usage by google, so it's quite fine. Google said in some interview that if you have a long article and split it up in to several pages, then you can use the rel prev/next.

$klark0:
basicly it's the search of my site, i search for example "apple" related topic, and i used rel prev/next between the pages about apple. Would that be okay?(it does not matter what these actual listings about, what matters that they are all about the same topic) So i ask again in my case would it be okay?

ps.: yesterday i wanted to ask this, then i saw that peego just opened this topic, so i didn't want to open another about rel prev/next

phranque

12:10 pm on Nov 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

Pagination - Webmaster Tools Help:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744 [support.google.com]

klark0

12:12 pm on Nov 27, 2012 (gmt 0)

@menntarra, if it's search results of your site then those pages shouldn't be crawlable or allowed to be indexed in the first place.