{"id":2673,"date":"2012-06-18T09:23:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-18T09:23:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/?p=2673"},"modified":"2012-06-18T09:23:18","modified_gmt":"2012-06-18T09:23:18","slug":"seo-pagination-guide-examining-a-real-life-scenario","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.webseoanalytics.com\/blog\/seo-pagination-guide-examining-a-real-life-scenario\/","title":{"rendered":"SEO Pagination Guide: Examining a Real Life Scenario – part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In the previous 2 articles of the SEO Pagination Guide we discussed the pros and cons of Pagination<\/a> and we presented the available methods that you can use to resolve the various SEO Problems<\/a> that popup. The problem is quite complicated since it requires good understanding of how each variable is affected and of what is the tradeoff in each case. Balance is the key<\/strong> and this is why in this article, we will examine holistically <\/strong>a Pagination Scenario taking into account the various parameters. Moreover we will discuss which are the most appropriate methods to use and what tricks can help us find the balance between SEO, Web Development and User experience.<\/p>\n

A typical Pagination Scenario<\/h2>\n

In order to understand the complexity<\/strong> of Pagination we need to examine closely the following example. Say you are the owner of a large News or Blogging site. Your website has numerous categories and in each category you can find a list of articles. Obviously the more articles you write, the more posts accumulate in each category and thus pagination becomes necessary. Adding additional categories to reduce the need for pagination is something you could look into it, but this will just postpone the problem rather than solve it. Eventually the articles in each category will become \u201ctoo many to show all at once\u201d and thus you will need to use pagination.<\/p>\n

List Pagination<\/h2>\n

The first thing to decide is what type of Pagination you will implement for your list of posts. The most common implementations are the \u201cnext – previous\u201d and the \u201c1 – 2 \u2026. – 150\u201d(or similar variations). Obviously the first one allows you to move forwards or backwards only by one page at the time, while the second one allows you to \u201cteleport\u201d to the pages between them. From SEO perspective the second option is by far better<\/strong> since it reduces the amount of steps that one should take in order to find a particular article. From a web developer\u2019s point of view, the second option is a nightmare<\/strong> because this implementation can create a massive load<\/strong> on the server.<\/p>\n

This is something that the owner must take into account and put some serious thought, balancing the costs<\/strong> of hosting, the response rate<\/strong>, the user experience<\/strong> and the SEO<\/strong>. Hybrid models can be developed to reduce load, but analyzing the technical part is beyond the scope of this article. For those who are interested in learning more on this (performance geeks and web developers), I strongly recommend you to check out Yahoo\u2019s presentation on Efficient Pagination<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since we are primarily interested in improving the SEO, we will assume that our owner after discussing with his SEO professional and his programmer, decided to develop the following pagination solution which seems to reduce the load<\/strong> and improve the SEO<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

< 12 – 13 – 14 – 15 – 16 ><\/p>\n

The above solution will allow you to link directly to pages 12-16. The arrow on the left will not transfer you on the page 1. Instead it will redirect you to page 11 which contains navigation links for the pages 7 to 11. Similarly the arrow on the right will not redirect you at the end of the results but rather show you the page 17 which contains navigation links for the pages 17 to 21.<\/p>\n

What I am describing above is a Hybrid of option 1 and 2. This is a great technical trick that can help you reduce the load on the server (reduce hosting costs & improve latency) and affect as little as possible your SEO campaign.<\/p>\n

In addition to the above we will use the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markups on the header of each page to ensure that the Search Engines will understand the relationship<\/strong> between component URLs in a paginated series. As we said on the previous article<\/a>, theoretically we could let Google try to understand this relationship on its own, nevertheless we don\u2019t want to leave it to \u201cluck\u201d and we want to ensure from our part that we used all the available methods to resolve the pagination problems. Obviously in this case we will not go for the \u201cView All\u201d page solution, since it would create a huge load<\/strong> on our server to list all the articles of a specific category on a single page.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"\n<\/div>\n

Article Pagination (Content Pagination)<\/h2>\n

As the owner of the website your main source of revenue comes from advertising<\/strong>. Thus increasing the ad impressions will help you increase your income and the number of advertisers that you serve. Splitting large articles into several pages (Article Pagination), will help you increase the average pageviews per user<\/strong> and thus increase the monthly ad impressions, without affecting too much the user experience and without placing too many ads on your pages.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately though splitting your article in two, three or more parts will affect your SEO campaign<\/strong>. In fact your SEO Professional probably recommends not doing this. His main point is that the more content you have on your articles, the more likely is to rank for various keyword combinations. Also he suggests that by splitting<\/strong> the article in several parts, you also split the total number of Links of the article, the PageRank that it receives, the number of Facebook & Twitter shares etc. All the above will have an impact on the strength of the pages and it will reduce the chance of achieving high rankings.<\/p>\n

As we discussed on the previous article the above issues can be resolved with 2 ways: Use \u201cView-All\u201d pages & Canonical URLs<\/strong> OR use the rel=”next” & rel=”prev” markups<\/strong>. (Again we could let Google try to detect this on its own, but we don\u2019t want to leave it to chance)<\/p>\n

Option 1: Use View-All pages & Canonical URLs<\/h3>\n
\n\"\"<\/div>\n

The first option is to create a View-All page which contains the complete content of the article. Moreover we will add rel=Canonical on the header of each paginated article that points to the View-All page.<\/p>\n

Benefits: <\/strong><\/p>\n