When you have a series of pages about the same product, category, or topic, it can cause problems for Google. The rel=prev/next link attribute can solve those problems.
Find out why in this video, along with hints on how to properly use rel=prev next.
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Resources Mentioned
- What Is Rel=prev/next and What Does It Do? with Gary Illyes of Google
- How to Implement Rel Prev/Next Tags (Digital Marketing Classroom series)
Transcript
Mark: So Eric, say I’m selling shoes online…
Eric: Okay. I’m selling shoes online.
Mark: No. How did I know you were going to do that? Anyway, I’ve got this online shoe store, okay, and one of my categories is men’s shoes. Now, it so happens that I have, like, 100 different pairs of men’s shoes. So I decide to make it easier for the browsing user, and I’ll divide those into 10 pages of 10 shoes each. Follow?
Eric: Yeah, your math checks out.
Mark: Yeah, thanks. Anyway, here is the thing. I don’t want search engines to think I have 10 duplicate pages of men’s shoes, and I don’t want to risk splitting my ranking signals for men’s shoes 10 different ways. So, what should I do?
Eric: Well, you’re in luck. Because Google and other search engines agree on a pretty easy solution.
Mark: Oh?
Eric: Yes! It’s known as the rel=prev or rel=next tags.
Mark: Okay. So how does it work?
Eric: It’s really quite simple. First, you create a series of navigation links between the pages. You might label them something like “Next Page” and “Previous Page.” In fact, for the user’s sake, you’ve probably already done something like that.
Mark: Yeah, I have. Always thinking of the user, that’s me.
Eric: Don’t get too proud yet. You aren’t quite done. Now you need to add to each of the “Next Page” links the tag rel=next and to each of the links to a previous page, the tag rel=prev.
Mark: Okay, but what does that do for me? I mean, the links work fine for my visitors now, so why add the extra tags?
Eric: Well, it’s to solve the problem you originally asked about, your concern about duplicate content for the same keyword, in this case, men’s shoes. In the video clip from our virtual keynote with Google’s Gary Illyes, he explains that rel=prev or next tells Google to treat the group of pages as a sequence. The advantage there is that the search ranking signals coming to any one page in the group are attributed to the whole group, so there’s no worry of watering down the signal.
Mark: That’s great.
Eric: But wait. There’s more. Even though the pages are treated as a group for ranking purposes, each page is still individually indexed by Google. So if a particular search query seems most relevant to the shoes on page three of the sequence, Google can still send the searcher directly to that page.
Mark: Cool.
Eric: If you want step-by-step instructions for implementing rel=prev/next correctly, check out my video from our digital marketing classroom series at the link on your screen now. In the meantime, be sure to join us every Monday for another episode of “Here’s Why.”
Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.
Mark you are very talented in writing:) i am following this blog in around a year and i never stopped reading!
My website has rel=”canonical”. How is this different?
That’s easy to answer, Scott! See https://www.PerficientDigital.com/how-to-implement-a-relcanonical/.
Thanks for the quick response, but I think what I should ask is, does the rel=”canonical” do what I need it to for my category pages?
That’s hard to answer without specifically knowing what you are trying to do, Scott. Can you provide more details on what you’re using rel canonical for in your categories, and where you are directing the links to?
Well, for example, my work pants category has three pages of products. Every one of those pages has My understanding is that this is so search engines will consider all pages in a category as one page. My eCommerce platform is set up with the “rel=”canonical”” on all pages, including product pages.
Scott, your second sentence got cut off, but let me try an initial answer to what I think you’re saying. Basically, if you have multiple pages of products in the same category, and users can move by navigation links between the pages, you should tag those “previous” and “next” page links with rel=prev or rel=next. Doing that will cause Google to see all those pages as under the one category, and they won’t compete with each other.
Rel=canonical is for another purpose altogether. First off, it shouldn’t be “on” a page. Rather it is an attribute of a link to a page. So if you have multiple pages that are virtually the same, but not connected by pagination links, then you should chose one of them as the canonical page for that item, and put rel=”canonical” tagged links on all the other versions, pointing to the canonical page.
what do you think is better to pages out of range? I mean, if last page is ?page=7 but I call to ?page=8
thanks
If you implement a rel=next statement that points to a non-existent page, how Google might treat that is unpredictable, so I’d avoid doing that. Hopefully, they’ll ignore the pointer to page=8, but I don’t know that they’ll do that. They might consider the entire rel=prev/next implementation invalid, and that’s probably not what you want.
Well, for example, my work pants category has three pages of products. Every one of those pages has prev/next tags on them. My understanding is that this is so search engines will consider all pages in a category as one page. My eCommerce platform is set up with the “rel=”canonical”” on all pages, including product pages.
So it is very important for SEO should be careful about reading
Yes I agree with you
thnks Mark for your helpful blog . how much important is to have rel=”canonical” in our websites ?
We have a video on that topic: https://www.PerficientDigital.com/how-to-implement-a-relcanonical-link/
thank you so much
Thanks Eric for the useful post
Good information about seo thanks a lot
Thanks Eric for the useful post