Technical SEO is one of the most critical components needed to optimize your website rankings and visibility. Understanding the various directives and implementing them makes a big difference in how search engines crawl, index, and rank your content. One such underrated directive is rel=prev next, which is used for paginated webpage content and helps maintain clean site architecture for SEO.
Despite no longer being used for indexing by Google since 2019, understanding its historical context and the current best practices for paginated content is still vital for a robust SEO strategy. This article dives into what the rel=prev/next setup is, how to set it up, and, more importantly, how to troubleshoot common issues related to paginated content.
Before discussing that, let’s first understand what rel tags are. These are powerful tags that are added to a website to signal the relationship between the paginated webpages on a site. One of the main highlights of rel tags is that they avoid duplicate content penalties. There are three distinct variations of rel tags:
While rel=”canonical” informs search engines like Google about the preferred version among multiple URLs with similar content, rel=”alternate” signifies a relationship between two or more webpages that share content but are presented in different languages. This is especially helpful when to use hreflang to serve different regions properly. The relationship between web pages within a paginated series is established through rel=prev and rel=next SEO. These attributes are added in the <head> section of the HTML document.
Let’s explain the concept with a simple example. Suppose you have an automobile website with a vehicle category of 30 cars, and you are showing 10 results per page. This means that the category will have 3 different URLs listed below:
Even though the URLs might look different, they are part of a single page that is split into different sections to increase readability. Using a canonical tag isn’t ideal because even though the pages are the same, the contents are different. This is where you should use rel=prev/next setup as it tells Google that the pages are part of the same sequence.
You will have to add the following tag for the first page:
This instructs search engines that the above URL is the second or next page in the sequence. When it comes to the second page, it will have the following tags:
Here, you can see we have used both the “prev” tag for the 1st page, signifying it as the previous one and the “next” tag for the 3rd page, referring to it as the continuation of the sequence.
The rel=prev/next setup attributes were introduced by Google in 2011 to specify the relationship between multiple URLs in a paginated series. Through these features, search engines understood the structure of long articles split across multiple pages. Using these tags on each page to link previous and next pages in the sequence helped prevent duplicate content problems and provided a positive web browsing experience for users. Therefore, the rel=next SEO impact was a significant factor in guiding search engines to properly understand the value of paginated content.
Some of the key purposes rel=prev and rel=next SEO served as listed below:
Today, with websites adopting newer techniques, knowing infinite scroll vs pagination SEO has become essential to choose the right approach for both user experience and search engine crawlability.
Despite not being a major ranking factor utilised by Google, if there are misconfigurations in your paginated content, it can still impact long-term SEO. Some of them might be caused by certain pagination optimization strategies, and identifying them is crucial to maintain crawlability and prevent duplicate content issues. Some of the problems are detailed below:
This is considered one of the most common issues. Adding the rel=canonical tag on each paginated page pointing to the first page tells search engines that the content in the subsequent pages is a duplicate of the main page. This results in those pages not being crawled and indexed despite having unique content.
Another issue is incorrectly placing the rel=prev/next tags on a page. As they are used to signify the previous and the next pages in a paginated series, misplacing them confuses search engines and users in figuring out both sections. This causes inconsistent web navigation and indexation problems.
The noindex tag tells the search engine crawlers not to index the specific web page and show it on search results. However, mistakenly applying them to high-value and relevant pages in the paginated series prevents them from getting indexed and ranked on search results.
Troubleshooting rel=prev/next tags can help you find out the issue and make necessary corrections to resolve it. Here we list some of the proper steps you can implement and learn how to fix rel=next/prev without difficulties.
Want to learn how to detect rel=next/prev? Inspect the HTML source of your webpage. Open the developer tools on your browser and check the <head> section of the HTML code to find the rel=prev/next and rel=canonical> tags.
Once you have learned how to check rel=next/prev, you must ensure that the canonical tags are correctly used. Each paginated webpage must have a self-referencing canonical tag. This is because it helps search engines consider each page as unique with relevant content rather than a duplicate of the main page.
Adding the rel=prev and rel=next SEO tags incorrectly causes navigation and indexing issues. The tags must be placed within the <head> section of the HTML page. You can check if they are correctly linked to the previous and next pages in a paginated sequence. If there are misplaced, update them quickly.
For example, if you are adding the tags on page 2 of a paginated webpage, it must be something like this:
Even if you have added the rel=prev next attribute on the relevant webpages, you must also ensure that you haven’t added a noindex tag to those pages. This prevents search engine crawlers from discovering and indexing the pages. Make sure that you use the noindex tag on pages with thin or low-value content.
As we wind up, you should have learned some interesting facts about rel=prev, rel=next and the rel=next SEO impact it has for your paginated website. Even though Google has discontinued using this concept since 2019, it doesn’t mean you have to stop using it if you have implemented it in any capacity. If the implementation process has been correct, there’s nothing to worry about rankings going down. If you have made any mistakes, you can do a troubleshooting rel=prev/next process to identify the issue and resolve it by following the strategies described above.
For such deep tech SEO insights, visit the GTECH website, a leading search engine optimization company in Dubai, UAE.
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