What to Do if Google Doesn't Support Rel=Prev/Next" — Top Tips

Content:

1. What Does Prev Next Pagination Issue Mean?
2. What Causes Pagination Issues With Your Website?
3. Top Tips for Fixing Pagination Issues
4. How You Can Fix Pagination Issues With Netpeak Checker
5. Bottom Line

In SEO, pagination means breaking a series of content up into a multi-page list. You most definitely can stumble upon it while visiting e-commerce websites: category pages, for instance, often break up a product range into several pages. Another example of pagination usage is blogs, where it's used to span a list of articles across multiple pages.

This post will cover the main tips to help you avoid potential issues with paginated content and prevent them via Netpeak Checker.

What Does Prev Next Pagination Issue Mean?

In 2019, Google decided to no longer use "rel prev next" and "rel next prev" tags for pagination, and it turned out they hadn't used them for several years before. However, if you’ve implemented "rel=prev/next" on your site, SEO experts recommend not removing it, as this can still help improve your rankings.

Yet, some issues might occur while implementing paginated pages on your site. In this post, we'll tell you more about the possible causes and means of avoiding such problems in the future.

What Causes Pagination Issues With Your Website?

Below, you'll find the main reasons that can cause Google pagination errors.

Canonicalizing to the first page

If Google pays attention to canonical tags, this can cut off crawl paths to multiple pages and result in orphaning the content. This will make it difficult for search engines to find and index valuable content and slow down the PageRank flow through your site. The best-case scenario is that Google simply ignores the canonical tag.

Nofollow links

Nofollow links are now considered a hint for Google, and the best-case scenario would be that the search engine ignores what you marked as nofollow. This may result in crawling interruptions that can orphan pages. Thus, you should never mark the internal links to other paginated pages as nofollow.

Crawling blocking

Blocking your website's pages from crawling will make it difficult to detect the necessary content there. As a result, you can expect orphaning pages and cutting off the PageRank flow through your website. One thing that could help may be searching for relevant directives in the robots.txt file and removing them.

Noindex pages

Adding noindex removes pages from the index, making them unable to rank and stopping the PageRank from passing.

The best thing to do would be to avoid adding noindex to these pages unless there's an alternative crawling path.

Top Tips for Fixing Pagination Issues

Now that you know what might cause pagination SEO issues, let's see how you can resolve them. Below, you'll find a list of the main tips you can try to prevent your website from potential pagination problems.

Using self-referencing canonical URLs

If you're not using a View All index for all the paginated content on your website, then each page included in the pagination should contain a canonical URL that points to itself.

Integrating crawlable anchor links

Make sure your site includes paginated pages with crawlable links with an anchor link and an "href" attribute.

Excluding paginated pages in sitemaps

Removing rel next prev tags and paginated pages from the sitemap will prevent the search engine from crawling and indexing those pages and help Google avoid ranking a random paginated page.

Optimizing meta tags (wherever possible)

Google now treats paginated pages as regular ones, meaning that it'll look at the basic on-page optimization for every page. So, you should optimize tags like titles and meta descriptions just as you do for any other page. For example, try adding a number to page titles to make it unique. This way, Google will see each paginated title as a unique one.

Moreover, you should add any SEO content only to the root pagination page. If you add the same texts and tags to all paginated pages, you'll stumble upon a duplicate content issue.

How You Can Fix Pagination Issues With Netpeak Checker

One of the most helpful ways of avoiding SEO pagination issues is running thorough checkups occasionally, and Netpeak Checker is a perfect tool for the job. This app can analyze over 450 parameters and integrate over 25 services and tools to get deeper insights into how your website performs and ranks in search engines.

Thanks to Netpeak Checker, you can detect potential and existing threats or errors with your website and get useful recommendations on solving them. This way, you'll always stay alert and know if any of your web pages needs any updates, from changing meta tags to managing redirects or fixing SEO pagination rel next prev issues.

Try Netpeak Checker for free — there's a trial version available to all Windows users. Get it today and improve your website's rankings and quality right away!

Bottom Line

If you already have implemented pagination SEO on your website, there’s no reason to change it. However, this doesn't prevent you from potential issues that can occur on the way. Due to crawling blocks, non-indexing pages, and other possible problems, you may face low page performance, so it's essential to know how you can react and resolve them.

In this essence, Netpeak Checker will come in handy as a powerful tool for in-depth SEO checks. It will detect pagination and other kinds of errors on any target page and show how your website is performing overall.

If you want to ensure high search rankings and minimum issues with your product or service page and increase the level of trust for your brand, Netpeak Checker will be a perfect tool for that. Once you identify the issues, it'll be much easier to deal with them, so why not try the app right away?