Optimizing a blog post series

[conradb]

I have a question about the best way to be Google and user friendly to optimize a blog post series.

Lets say there is a blog post series divided in 5 parts, so 5 separate blog posts about "How to Blue Widgets". What is the best way to optimize it.

This 5 blog posts series,will pretty much be targeting for the same keyword. So causing an issue with dividing links between articles etc. If I point the canonical tag of articles 2-4 to article 1, there is a high chance that Google will de-index articles 2-4 from their search results. So this is not a good idea, since most content will not be seen.

On the other hand, creating a whole article with all these posts together, will create a very long article. Then I doubt users will read it. Please note this is highly curated content.

I was wondering if we can implement something similar to the SEO pagination provided by Google maybe it will help. So have all blog posts(1-5) which a separate and a "view all" page. Then the rel="canonical" from all parts pointing to this view-all page.

Thanks in advance for all your responses!

[not2easy]

Hi conradb, welcome to the Forums. Google suggests for a series of pages to use a slightly different version of the meta-tag using a "previous" and "next" if you can. The first page only has a next tag and the last page only has a previous tag and in between they all get two tags like these (for page two):

<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/page1.html">
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/page3.html">

[conradb]

thank you for your suggestion not2easy. That implementation you mentioned is one of the pagination options that can implemented. In my post I went for option 2 using the view-all page.

Using the rel=prev/next I do not know if it makes sense, as I think originally this was implemented for eCommerce sites?

[edited by: brotherhood_of_LAN at 10:30 pm (utc) on Jul 16, 2014]
[edit reason] no personal urls as per terms of service. thanks [/edit]

[EditorialGuy]

Using the rel=prev/next I do not know if it makes sense, as I think originally this was implemented for eCommerce sites?

Here's what Google has to say:

"Throughout the web, a paginated series of content may take many shapes—it can be an article divided into several component pages, or a product category with items spread across several pages, or a forum thread divided into a sequence of URLs."

Source:

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

[conradb]

That is good to know. So the pagination method can be used in this case.

Are there any advantages of using the View-All method instead of using rel=next/prev method?

Thanks!