Pagination SEO Using rel=”next” and rel=”prev” Link Attributes

SEO friendly pagination is important for content sites which uses pagination to publish lengthy articles. Pagination is important to present lengthy content in a user friendly multi-page format. For example if you are a blogger who writes lengthy articles, then it is very common to use multiple pages to display the content. Splitting the lengthy articles into multiple pages not only keeps the page clean but also helps your readers to navigate and read easily without scrolling all the way down to read the complete article.
But how do you tell Google about the logical sequence of malt page articles? You can make use of rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attribute values of <link> tag to overcome pagination seo issues.
Usually the <link> tag defines the relationship between a document and an external resource. For example we use link tag to link to external style sheets (CSS files).
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The “rel” attribute of HTML link tag specifies the relationship between the current document and the linked document.

Using rel=”next” and rel=”prev” to hint Pagination to Search Engines

Since link tag specifies the relationship between current document and the linked document the attributes rel=”next” and rel=”prev” gives a strong hint to Google to treat the specified pages as a logical sequence. For example, you have created an article with three pages, page1.html, page2.html, page3.html.
In the first page you can add the following to indicate the next page.

1

<link rel="next" href="http://www.mysite.com/page2.html">

On the second page you can add links to the first and third page.

1
2

<link rel="prev" href="http://www.mysite.com/page1.html">
<link rel="next" href="http://www.mysite.com/page3.html">

And finally in the third page the link should be

1

<link rel="prev" href="http://www.mysite.com/page2.html">

This will help the search engines to treat your pages as sequence and index them accordingly.
Apart from the above attribute values “rel” attribute of link tag can have many other values. All these values indicate the relationship between the current document and the linked document.

“rel” attribute values of <link> HTML tag

• home
• index
• alternate
• appendix
• bookmark
• chapter
• contents
• copyright
• glossary
• help
• section
• start
• stylesheet
• subsection