Why is there a re=prev & re=next in every articles head?

[brand404]

I notice that Wordpress adds:

<link rel='prev'..>
<link rel='next'..>
<link rel='cannonical'...>
to every unique article despite each article post is not related to the previous/next one. Why is that? From what i read prev/next are used to hint to google (bing,etc) that the pages are all related (pagination happening). And the canonical is the start of an article (or the full article itself).

For example, on my site i have 3 articles:

Topic: Ketchup = Source code shows rel='prev' points to Quantum Mecahnics, rel='next' points to Fashion Trends, rel=canonical to itself
Topic: Quantum Mechanics = Source code shows rel='prev' points to Fashion Trends, rel='next' points to Ketchup, rel=canonical to itself
Topic: Fashion Trends = Source code shows rel='prev' points to Ketchup, rel='next' points to Quantum Mechanics, rel=canonical to itself

Huh? Is wordpress applying these attributes incorrectly?

How does this affect SEO since technically these articles arent related by the prev/next makes it seem they are.

[lucy24]

Is wordpress applying these attributes incorrectly?

In a word, yes-- unless the idea is that any one person's blog must obviously have some unifying theme, even if it's invisible to the naked eye. Then whatever you wrote about yesterday counts as "previous" to whatever you write about today, and whatever you feel like writing about tomorrow is by definition "next". If the same site really talks about ketchup, fashion trends and quantum mechanics, this may even be true :)

The good news is that google knows a WP site when it sees one, so it probably just ignores anything it has seen more than 100,000 times before.

[brand404]

thanks very much for the clarification