Google has released information on its consideration of pagination. With new tags, it is possible to indicate the pages that are part of an expanded section of the site.

Just as when creating the attribute rel = “canonical”, Google has taken a step forward in the fight against duplicate content. Indeed, the engine has just announced the availability of new markers to facilitate the inclusion of pagination.

New tags for paging:

The tags link rel = “next” & rel = “prev” used to indicate the engine instead of a page within a set of pages in the form of pagination, such as a long list of products or articles split into several pages.

Indeed, many shops fragmenting their product listings on multiple pages, these new tags allow the engine to then see more clearly in the sub-pages and therefore return more relevant results, namely, the first page.

Google proposes new tags to put in place head pages involved in paging. Here is an example of the tags to set up in the head of each page:

<link rel=”prev” href=”http://www.decideseo.com/categories1?1″ />
<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.decideseo.com/categories1?3″ />

Note also that the first page can only contain a tag link rel = “next” since there is no page that precedes it. It is the same for the last page that only accepts link rel = “prev” puisq’il is the last page. (Captain Obvious!)

All other pages, page 2 to the penultimate page should include each of these tags. You can use absolute or relative URLs, Google does you will not mind.

Prioritize the items on one page:

Google recommends, however, focus on pages that do not need to segment the content. According to the engine, loading a full page is a little longer, but users will not need to reload the page when they want to see more from the list or section.

Google even states that some sites offer their content in a fragmented manner in addition to a concatenated version. The engine then recommended to use the tag rel = “canonical” from the fragmented version of the content to highlight the page with all content.