Over the past couple years, the pagination of content has become a popular tactic. For those of you who don’t keep up with asinine marketing terms, pagination in this context just means spreading your content out over multiple pages. This is usually done to increase views and lower bounce rates, both of which are great things for the advertisers on your page, and your own bottom line. It’s a little annoying, but it does have its uses, especially with longer content or listed items. If you want to implement some pagination domination as part of your Business SEO, more power to you, just make sure you’re going about it the right way.
According to Google, there are three ways to paginate content and maintain all your link juice:
1. Do nothing. Seriously, Google sees paginated content all the time and they have a pretty good grasp on it. Still, if you want more control, you can look at steps 2 and 3.
2. Create a canonical View All page. In most cases, all the paginated content could conceivably be listed on one main View All page. If you can, create this View All page and use rel=”canonical” on all of the individual pages to indicate the View All version is the one that should be indexed.
3. Use Next and Prev links. This is the most labor intensive method but it’s great for lists that you just don’t want to break up. Essentially, you use the tags rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to create a logical sequence of pages, the first of which will be most likely to be indexed. On each page of the list, include the “next” tag with a link pointing at the next page, and do the same with the “prev” tag, showing Google a clear ordered list.
Honestly, any of these methods will probably serve you just fine. The only thing we’d advise is think about WHY you’re paginating content to begin with. Sure, your views may go up and your bounce rate may go down, but how many people are you driving away with annoying content delivery?