pagination indexing

change of pagination style

[abushahin]

Ok previously I had numbered pagination i.e. go to page 1|2|3 etc and the search engine bots have indexed many of my pages, now I have switched to FIRST NEXT PREV LAST style pagination. I wondered if anyone knew if that would cause a problem when indexing i.e. will the bots still follow the pagination links even though the anchor text remains the same in each page.

[goodroi]

assuming everything is kept the same and all you did was change the anchor text, then the search engines will crawl it.

both of your solutions are not ideal. internal anchor text is very important to search engines. by labeling the links - 1,2,3 or first, next, prev you are not maximizing your link juice. you should think about different ways to handle this so you can have more relevant (and keyword rich) anchor text.

[abushahin]

Hey thanks for the pointer about maximising link anchor text. have you any suggestions as to what may be a better way of maximising link text?

[goodroi]

it depends on your system. look at the bottom of WebmasterWorld threads and notice how the newer & older links use the title of the pages as the anchor text. that is one better way of doing it.

[abushahin]

Many thanks

[g1smd]

The biggest pagination issue, is one that is never addressed.

You have some content on Page 1. Next week you add more content, and the content that was on Page 1 is now on Page 2.

Until Google comes along and re-indexes Page 1, and finds and indexes Page 2, all your visitors arriving at Page 1 won't find the content they were expecting.

Additionally, once Google finds Page 2, and until it reindexes Page 1, Page 2 will be considered a Duplicate of Page 1.

The next week, new content appears on Page 1, and the content on Page 2 moves to Page 3, and the content on Page 1 moves to Page 2.

Rinse and repeat. After a while there's a long trail of URLs that used to have the content on, but no longer do.



You'll also see that it plays havoc with the kick you get from backlinks. Essentially, you have a link from a page for a while, then that link disappears from that page number and re-appears on a different page number.

If the new page number gets spidered before the old one is re-spidered you might appear to have a link from each of the two pages.

If the old page number gets re-spidered before the new page number, then your incoming links seems to disappear for a while.



So, why aren't you posting the first page to Page 1, then the new information to Page 2, and the next lot to Page 3, leaving the Page Number static for each piece of content?

[mark_roach]

I am currently re-designing my site and I have a similar problem to the one which g1smd has described, if a little more complicated.

My site a directory with the content created by my members. At the moment I have a single page for each of category of widget. On the category pages each specific widget has a snippet of text and link to a that widget's (members) page.

Some of more popular category pages will contain text and links to nearly 1000 specific widgets, where as the less popular ones may have less than 10.

In the interest of fairness to my members, each day I amend the order in which the widgets appear on their category page. There is some logic to the ordering, but it is essentially random.

As part of the redesign I now want to paginate the categories because, as you can imagine, 1000 entries a page does not provide the best user experience. It still however seem to work with Google !

It is still important for me to be able rotate the listing order in my pseudo random way and this is where the complication arises.

At the moment, a category page will look completely different from one day to the next. However this does not cause problems for visitors coming from search engines because all the information is still on the page all be it in a different place.

Also a good proportion of my visitors from search engine enter with searches for <widget location>. If possible I strip the referal string and sort my category page with the relevant "location" entries sorted to the top. This may be considered cloaking by some but it doesn't seem to have caused me any problems.

If I now paginate the category page, it is likely that none of the text which appears on a given page on one day will be on the same page the next day. It will also prevent me from easily sorting the "location" entries.

Whilst describing writing this post to describe my problem, I have thought of a few potential solutions.

I don't want to show the search engines the category pages in the same order every time as page1 will be the most heavily linked page and therefore most likely to be returned for a <widget> search. I could however rotate the order less frequently for spiders (perhaps monthly) and if a visitor enters from a Search Engine I could give them the current month's view rather than the daily view a normal visitor would see.

If I also detect a "location" search I could display the requested page, even if it no longer has any "location" information on it and add a prominent link to "Show location widgets".

This is possibly the single biggest challenge in my site re-design so any suggestions will be gratefully received.