Search engine optimization of page navigation. What is page pagination and how to optimize it

Hi all! There are seemingly elementary and obvious things in SEO, but if you understand them a little, many questions and nuances arise that worry project owners. Today I want to talk about pagination pages (or also called listing pages). I would like to write a detailed lesson: what, why and why, in order to explain everything how we managed to do this with the lesson.

I already talked about it on my blog (I also told you what page navigation is). Now it's time to show what you need to do with them from an SEO point of view. Many people are concerned about the following questions:

• should they be closed for pagination indexing in robots.txt;
• maybe you should close them with meta name="robots";
• or better use rel=canonical;
• or maybe even leave them open for indexing;
• Well, other questions.

So, let's go!

Pagespagination are pages that are created when a list of posts or products is split into several pages. Here is an example of pagination navigation on my blog, these links lead to pagination pages:

As you already understood, page navigation can be on pages that contain a large number of:

• product cards;
• information posts;
• discussions on forums.

Pagination indexing

It’s better not to block pagination pages from indexing so that robots reach as many products/posts as possible (especially important when you have a lot of products). But again, even though the pages are open for indexing, I would recommend making sure that they are not included in the main search. I am against low-quality pages in the index and believe that only the necessary pages should be in the search, and the importance of such pages will be higher than being full of low-quality content. How then?

The whole difficulty lies in the fact that the two largest search engines on our market (Yandex and Google) have different requirements. Let's look at them.

Yandex requirements

Moreover, in this case there will be no problems with indexing products or posts, since rel=canonical does not prohibit robots from crawling through the pages, but the index will only contain the main page in both search engines.

Google requirements

That is, Google does not recommend, as Yandex does, putting canonical on the first page; it also says that this is wrong. But from experience it has been noticed that if you put rel=canonical on the first page, nothing critical happens; sites feel good in both search engines.

And yes, there is such a point: Yandex doesn’t care about the rel=prev and rel=next tags, it doesn’t understand them and simply ignores them.

What do SEOs say?

There are a lot of opinions on this topic, I’ll give a couple.

Some people say that each pagination page needs to be tailored to different queries. For example, the first page is under “Buy a laptop,” the second is under “Buy a laptop inexpensively,” the third is under “Buy a laptop in an online store,” and so on. Don't do this. Search engines are not so stupid, maybe it worked 5-8 years ago, but now it’s definitely not worth doing.

And someone says to prohibit it in robots.txt or use the meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" tag. I did this before too, but it’s not entirely correct, since behavioral factors from the pagination pages will not be transferred. Yes, and Yandex also says:

I don’t promote category pages on the blog (but in vain, I talked about the benefits of the right one), I can’t get around to it, somehow I’ll definitely get around to it and remove “noindex, follow”. For those who promote categories, I recommend using the instructions above.

Duplication in pagination

By the way, if Yandex believes that pagination pages are duplicates, then Google does not think so; the main thing for it is to indicate rel=prev and rel=next. If you use the rel=canonical tag on the main page, then only that page will be in the index. If you use only rel=prev and rel=next, the pagination pages will be included in the search engine index.

The prev and next tags show the robot that the pages are connected in a logical sequence, as if they were one big page. This is why it is wrong to simultaneously use rel prev/next and rel canonical on the main page. That is, if you want to specify both canonical and prev/next, then we point canonical only to the page itself (to itself).

How to design pagination pages

The text of the heading/category description should be displayed only on the first page; pagination should not be displayed on other pages. This is so that there is no strong duplication, and the text is still displayed primarily for robots. And users who have already moved to the second and other pages are no longer interested in the texts + improved usability.

If you have an online store, you can add a link to the "All products" page of this category. This will allow you to view the page immediately, without navigating to other pages. In this case, search engines recommend putting rel=canonical on this page with all products without pagination. But here you need to be careful, because if you display a lot of products/posts, the page will take longer to load, and search engines like sites that are as fast as possible.

And also, if we are on the second or any other page, the link to the first page should go directly to the main page, and not to /page/1, here is an example:

I repeat, there is no need to block pagination pages from indexing. Again, a screenshot of “Plato’s” comment and a link to it have already been given above.

Someone does endless scrolling (products/posts are loaded as you scroll down the page). If you do this, again you need to be careful. Or someone displays "Show more" buttons:

Infinite scrolling and other javascript/ajax can be used, but to avoid problems, I would recommend making sure that all elements are indexed and sent to the robot. And yet, I would duplicate the endless scrolling with numbers 1,2,3,4, since some users find it more convenient. Here's an example:

Also, when there are a lot of pages, you can make a breakdown of 10 pages to make it easier for the indexing robot to “run” through the pages, and the pages will be located in fewer clicks. That is, we output something like this:

1, 2, 3 ... 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70...79.

Conclusion - what is the right thing to do in the end?

In my opinion, there are 3 options for the most correct development of events:

1. If Yandex is important to you or both search engines are interesting (for almost all projects for Russia), then we make a canonical on the first page.
2. If you are only interested in Google (for example, your site is located in the CIS countries, where in some of them there is practically no traffic in Yandex, or foreign projects), then we make rel canonical for itself and register prev/next.
3. If you have a page where all products are displayed, you can point the rel canonical to it, use rel=prev and rel=next. Then it will be correct for both search engines. But in this case, let me remind you, there are also disadvantages: if you have categories where a larger number of products are displayed, this will slow down the loading speed of the site, and this affects the ranking.

In all cases, a ban on indexing is not required (neither in robots.txt, nor in meta name="robots"). Do not forget that we place the text only on the 1st page, so that there are no duplicates with a large number of matches. You can track changes to pages in the index in the Yandex and Google webmaster panels.

If you take similar steps to optimize your site, the results will not be long in coming. Here is a fresh example from our latest work (this is the total traffic from search engines, we started working in October 2017, click to enlarge):

Guys, who managed to get to the pre-recording of my SEO marathon, I answered almost everyone’s questions, there’s still a little bit left, a lot of questions have come in, I’m sorting them out. 🙂 If suddenly you didn’t have time to sign up for the pre-registration of the marathon, wait for news on the blog (subscribe to the mailing list so as not to miss the start of sales), we start in February!

Well, the question is: what do you do with pagination pages on your projects?

Kristina Zagorulko

Jun 30, 2015 | Reading time: 6 min

All large online stores must use pagination – page-by-page navigation of products. This is done for the convenience of visitors. Imagine that a section contains a couple of hundred units of goods. Put them all on one web page? In principle, it is possible. Unlike a paper page, an Internet page is dimensionless. Use scrolling and view the product. Yes, the site page is dimensionless, but the connection speed is finite! And if each product item has images (and this is almost always done now), then such a web page can take a very long time to load. But if pagination is always good for website usability, then for SEO, its incorrect configuration promises a deterioration in rankings in search results and complicates indexing:

• search engines may fine a site for duplicating content;
• Product units will be indexed for a very long time, which means they will not be detectable through search.

Let's take a closer look at these problems.

It’s a limit and search engines have a limit.

The search engine robot does not spend as much time on the site as is necessary to index all its pages. This time is limited and is determined by the frequency of content updates, trust and a host of other values. Now imagine the situation: in an online store, each section has 20-30 pages, differing only in product names. And the robot will index each page, that is, read its contents. And he won’t even get to the page for a specific product, because it is located a level lower. But the owner of an online store needs something completely different - indexing of product pages!

Duplicate Content Problem

Search engines treat identical content even within the same site poorly. The logic is simple. The site's web page should contain content that is as relevant as possible to the request. And if it is almost identical on different pages, that is, there is a list of product units (it is different for different pages, but very similar, since the product is of the same type) plus the SAME description of the entire group of products, which contains the keywords. How then to determine the most relevant of all such Internet pages? Essentially, from an SEO point of view, the weight of the pages is dissipated. The main page of the section (catalog) is lost among dozens of similar ones. This means that it will inevitably sag in the search results, or rather, all web pages will sag.

SEO optimization options for pagination pages

First, let's decide what we want. The minimum task is to organize pagination in such a way that it does not harm SEO, that is, does not worsen the site’s performance in search results. Maximum task: contributed to improving the site’s performance in search results. Now let's look at the available options.

Option #1. Prohibiting indexing of pagination pages

A. Using the noindex meta tag

This SEO optimization option implies that in the section EACH web page of pagination except the first line is added:

In other words, you prevent the search engine robot from indexing this web page, but you allow it to follow links from it.

A few nuances of SEO optimization:

• Eliminate duplicate first page URLs when dynamically creating web pages. In other words, if the site implements filters, the content of the page depends on the specified conditions: sorting by price - higher, lower, by popularity, by brand, etc. To do this, the link to the first page of the catalog should look like: domain name/catalog . And from the page: domain name/catalog?page=1 you need to make a 301 redirect to the page: domain name/catalog.
• Be sure to create an XML sitemap.

Pros:

• This option is perfectly understood by Yandex.

Minuses:

• The noindex tag is not accepted by Google.
• With a large number of filters and products in the catalog, you get a large number of dynamic pages on which you need to add the noindex meta tag.
• Content from pagination pages is completely excluded, with the exception of the first one.

B. Using the robots.txt file

Let our pagination pages look like http://domain name/category/page/n, where n is the page number. In this case, we write the directive in the robots.txt file: Disallow: /category/page.

In the case of dynamic web pages like http://domain name/category?page/n the directive will look like: Disallow: ?page=

This method of SEO optimization is more universal, but is not without its main drawback - content is completely excluded from the pagination pages, with the exception of the first one.

Option #2. Using the canonical tag and the "See all" page

The essence of this SEO optimization option is that a web page is created on which the entire catalog product is displayed, and using the canonical tag (we wrote about it in the article “”) you point search engines to it as a canonical web page. For example, you have a “Lampshades” section in your online store. Then you need to create an Internet page with all the lampshades, for example, with the following URL: domain name/abajyru/?&show_all=yes. And on all web pages there is pagination in the section write the line:

.

Nuances of SEO optimization:

• If there are a lot of products, then such a web page may take quite a long time to load. The solution is to reduce the resolution of product images.

Pros:

• The canonical tag is understood by both Google and Yandex. At the same time, for Google this method of excluding pages from indexing is a priority.
• All pagination page content will be indexed through the "See All" web page.

Minuses:

• It imposes certain restrictions on the quality of pictures and the overall volume of content.
• For Yandex, the canonical tag is not directive. He can ignore it. And this likelihood increases if the content on the web pages is not identical. And this will definitely happen, because the list of goods will be different.
• With a large number of filters and products in the catalog, you get a large number of dynamic pages on which you need to add the canonical tag.

Option #3. AJAX pagination

The essence of this SEO optimization option is that when you scroll down a page, new content is loaded into it. This is achieved using AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) technology, which allows data exchange between the server and the user's browser in the background. Many people are very familiar with this technology, because it is implemented in VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. AJAX allows you to load the product list all the time and the second and subsequent web pages of the catalog simply do not exist.

Pros:

• To search engines, the directory will look like one web page, so everything will be indexed and there will be no duplication of content.
• There is no danger of a web page taking a long time to load (as is the case with the “Show All” page).

Minuses:

• To implement such pagination in an online store, an experienced programmer is required;
• if the text on such a catalog page is written not only for promotion, but also for users (and this is how it should be), then, if there is a large number of products, it will have to be placed at the top, which is unusual for the user.

Option number 4. Pagination using rel=”prev” and rel=”next” tags

This version of SEO optimization is based on the fact that with the help of these tags, Google is given a command when indexing to combine the pages tagged with them into one whole. Here's how it's done in practice.

Let's say we have four directory web pages. Then to the section page No. 1 we put the line:

For page No. 2 it will look like this:

For page #3:

And finally, for page #4:

Pros:

• Allows you to index all your content as if it were on one page, but without using a cumbersome "See All" web page.

Pagination - page-by-page navigation on a website or even simpler, sequential numbering of website pages. It seems to be a banal and widespread phenomenon, however, there are still disputes around it about whether what should pagination be for SEO?.

Everyone has their own examples and arguments, but the essence is usually the same: more pages - better SEO. No, not better. Why I already wrote, but let's take a closer look page-by-page navigation on the site. What should be the sequential numbering of site pages so as not to harm SEO, at a minimum. Why not harm? Because the tasks of search engine optimization of a website include determining the exact match of a page to a key query, rather than creating an infinite number of duplicates of the same page with the title “Page #911”.

Benefits of pagination for SEO

Let's look at the incredible benefits of page navigation for a website in terms of. It provides access to all site pages from the list of category pages. Yes indeed. Especially when you have 50 pages and to get to, say, page 21, the crawler has to drill down... how many levels? Find a product or post on page 21 and go one more level. Yes, the benefits are enormous, especially considering that search bots do not go deeper than 3-4 levels of nesting. No, well, of course they do, but the value and terms of indexing with each level fall exponentially.

What else is useful to us from the serial numbering of website pages? It limits the number of links on the page, because it is inappropriate to have more than 100 links on one canvas. This is really useful. There is also an indirect benefit, in the form of page navigation, which is one of the most popular and familiar methods of displaying large lists of information on a website. That's why we keep it. That seems to be all.

We figured out the benefits of serial numbering of website pages. Now let's figure out how to use pagination and not spoil it.

SEO of page navigation on the site

Let's start with the theory: Each page of the site must answer a specific request. This means that a category with many pages, namely its main canonical page with a direct address, must respond to a specific request. Therefore, a similar page with duplicate content that is or once was on the main page of a category is not just a duplicate, but, what’s much worse, a competitor to the main page of the category.

There are unique people who try to personalize category number pages by adding page numbers to the headings and even changing the page description according to the template. But here's one question: what query does any of the number pages answer? Especially when you consider the migration of content from page to page. For what key query should the category number page appear in search results, like ? There are no such requests. And as pages for non-existent queries, such pages should not participate in site indexing.

To be fair, we are not talking about chaotic sources like poorly organized forums where you can find one exact match for a key query somewhere on page 768 in one of the posts. I'm talking about sites where there is a rigid structure and a clear logical organization of key queries.

Excluding pagination from indexing

Depending on how the page navigation on the site is organized, you can use various methods to exclude pages from the site's sequential numbering. Let's look at examples:

Eliminating pagination via Canonical links

In short, then canonical link is a link to the main page of the section or the page that is decided to be considered the main one. On each numbered page we indicate a link to the main page and “oh, miracle!” — all numbered pages fly away as if excluded from indexing. If in more detail, then read.

And this is what the code that needs to be placed on each number page looks like:

Excluding pagination via Robots Disallow

Let's imagine that the address of the number page looks like this:

Http://site.ru/category/page/3

All you need to do is ask search robots not to go where they shouldn’t, namely:

Disallow: /category/page

We insert it into and forget about page navigation. Just like in poetry. But then the magnificent Mr. Robots gives us another surprise.

Avoid pagination of dynamic pages

If pagination on the site is organized using dynamic URLs:

Http://site.ru/category?page=3

Please go back to robots.txt and add the ones you already know:

Disallow: ?page=

Clean-param: page /

Get used to creating only landing pages on your website that convey unique, useful information for visitors and pages that do not compete with each other for key queries. Think about which pages should be closed and which should be open for indexing. And most importantly, do not chase the number of meaningless pages - you will lose.

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Hello, dear readers of the site site. Another indexing management tool that should be used on almost any site is pagination. What is pagination page? This is your catalog page or a list of some blog articles. That is, we usually go to the first page of the catalog, and at the bottom there are some more: 1 2 3 4 and arrows for turning pages. All these pages are called pagination pages.

The problem is that they all duplicate each other’s content (), not so much the content as the meaning. That is, if we have a section for adidas sneakers, then we have 5-10 pages that contain adidas sneakers. Although they wear different sneakers, the relevance of these pages is approximately the same.

Now search engines do a good job with pagination on their own, they understand which page is the main one, which is 2nd, 3rd or 4th - they understand this. But we are still engaged in optimization, we must tell the search engine how to correctly sequence this page.

And for this we use special attributes:

Rel="next" rel="prev"

These are the attributes with which we must mark these paging links, or we can specify these attributes in the head block of our html page. If you don't understand what we're talking about - .

Thus, we must indicate which page is the next page in our list, which is the previous one. If we do this, then the search engine will understand that this is not a set of independent pages, but a sequence of pages that are basically the same thing, they are just pages of the same pagination. And the search engine will perceive the main page as the main page of this sequence, that is, as a page that does not have these attributes.

This is beneficial for us, because the search engine will index all these pages, add all these pages to the index, but in the search it will display exactly the first page of the catalog. Not 3, 4 or 5, but the first.

We will be able to work with text factors on pagination pages and achieve some positions.

Here is an example from this site. Please note that on the first screen there is the code of the main page and the “next” attribute is indicated there, but there is no “prev” attribute, since this is the main page and there cannot be a previous one. Also listed with a link to the main page.

But here is the second pagination page and there is already a “prev” attribute.

Sometimes it happens that without markup, the search engine begins to consider the 3rd, 4th or 5th page of pagination more important, although all efforts are put into promoting the first page. This can cause serious problems with your site's rankings for related queries.

When working with pagination pages, it is important to understand that if you can do without breaking the catalog pages into several pages, then try to limit yourself to the minimum number of such pages.

If you have 30 products in each category, then most often you can simply show 30 products in a category on one page at once and then you won’t have to do any additional markup and you definitely won’t have these pagination pages, because they It just won't happen.

It’s also a good idea to use dynamic loading of products using a java script, when, as you scroll down the page, new products gradually appear. The only thing that is very important here is to check whether all these products are indexed and whether there are links to them from the site pages. Because if your website page links go only to the first 30 products, then the search engine simply may not be able to reach the rest of the products.

It is important that these products, which are loaded dynamically, have links from other product cards, and all these products must be added to the sitemap. We talked about sitemap in the last lesson. If you add them to your sitemap, this will give you confidence that these products will be indexed by the search engine.

In most cases, the pagination design is created either by the cms itself or by plugins. This is not done manually now. A plugin can help in this matter

(or as it is also called - page navigation). How it is implemented determines how many products the visitor will see, and this is the depth of views, and most importantly, for an online store, that the product that the buyer has seen has a greater chance of being purchased.

This interface element is often given undeservedly little attention. It’s straightforward, standard, and can be done in 10 minutes, just like “breadcrumbs.”

The article will not talk about technical implementation using php, css, ajax and jquery, but I will talk about what the correct page navigation should be so that it is not only beautiful, but also helps the store sell and does not interfere with search engine optimization.

What can a paginator be like?

It is important that the page navigation in the product catalog, or any other list if you want it to be looked beyond the first page, is noticeable and understandable. Many people, including large online stores, sin shamelessly on both these points.

For example, this is how page navigation is done in the new version of the Wildberries.ru store

Small, faded, unnoticeable.

Page pagination varies. There are dozens of ways to do it. I will list a few for clarity.

Numbers with page numbers. The most familiar paginator, with digital page numbering and forward-backward buttons. Such a paginator appeared simultaneously with the Internet and in many implementations, even on modern sites it has not changed. Look at the screenshot of page navigation in the lamoda.ru store. Otherwise, the main target audience of such a tool is search robots.

This is what pagination looks like in the lamoda.ru online store.

Everyone is accustomed to such pagination and the task of breaking the section into pages is performed normally by them. This implementation of page navigation is quite suitable for a section with company news, or other materials that have no value in their outdated form, so rarely does anyone other than a search engine view the second page of the news list. This option is not suitable for a product catalog. Poorly visible, does not motivate to click on link “2” to view the second page.

"Show more". There are different options for improving this paginator. For example, in addition to the list of pages and traditional “forward” and “back” links, there is a large, noticeable “Show more” button, which loads a new piece of content. This is already better than the simple previous option.

An example from a news site, but as an illustration it is quite suitable.

This is done in a similar way in Yandex image search.

For an online store, an option that works well is when on the product list page, instead of the last product, a “More” link is displayed, and below it is traditional pagination.

To click on “2” or “Next Page” in traditional pagination, the user must want it, otherwise they will not notice the pagination block at all. In this implementation, he will notice the link in any case, since it takes the place of one of the products that he is looking at. And if instead of the faceless “Next page” you write something motivating, for example “80 more incredible evening dresses,” then the chances will increase even more.

And, of course, there is the most modern option for how to do pagination - endless scroll. It will become immediately clear what we are talking about if you remember what viewing news on your VKontakte page looks like. There is no pagination block. You scroll the page with your mouse and the content is loaded automatically. An excellent option for an online store, but it also has certain disadvantages. We must not forget about users with outdated browsers and not very fast computers. In general, this option is almost ideal, especially if you take into account the interests of the search robot and make it the good old numbered page navigation.

SEO Mistakes in Pagination Navigation

Pages 2, 3, etc. are not much different from the first page of the section with a list of products. Therefore, with the right approach, pagination pages may well be found well in search engines. I will list a number of SEO mistakes that occur most often and prevent them from being searched well.

Duplicate Title Tag Contents

The same Title (title in the browser window) is a common error that leads to some paginator pages being dropped from the search engine results. Occurs due to the generation of all subsequent pages (2, 3, etc.) based on the template of the first page of the catalog.

The name of the pagination pages should be different. At a minimum, automatically add the text “Page 1”, “Page 2”, etc. to the section title. A good option is to come up with names in advance and display them on the corresponding pages. Of course, the names should not be random, taken out of thin air, but in keeping with the topic of the corresponding section. They should also not be released randomly every time.

One description for all pages

Same as with the previous error. Often all pagination pages use the same description in the description tag. This is wrong; there should be no duplication of description. Also in the description there is no need to duplicate the contents of the title tag. For all pages of the paginator, except the first one, it is better to either remove the description completely or fill it with a pre-prepared description.

One section description text for all pages

Not to be confused with description. :-) There is an old, but still quite working and legal way to improve the relevance of pages - sections with products for certain search queries. This is adding a small text description of the section at the very end of the page, immediately below the list of products.

So, the error is that this text is displayed on all pagination pages. This is not true. The text describing the section should be displayed only on the first page. On others there is no need to duplicate the same text.

Closing from indexing

When a site uses CNC everywhere except search, robots.txt often blocks all pages containing parameters in the URL from indexing. This is the right approach (I wrote more about this in the article about basic things for internal website optimization), but it is important not to forget about page navigation, the pages of which must remain visible to search engines. Be sure to check that they are available for indexing.

Even such a simple and familiar page element as a paginator can and should look different, depending on the site’s tasks. If the task is to show the visitor products so that he can choose and buy from them, then simply inserting a paginator from a set of UI elements into the design layout is not the best solution. Yes, it will work, but with a little thought you can do better.

In conclusion, some simple tips:

• If you don’t have too many products in your sections, for example, no more than 100 items. in each, then you don’t need page navigation at all. Do not display products of 20 or whatever number on the page. Show everything at once, it will work better than meaningless pagination in this case (when there are few products in the section).
• If there are a lot of products in the sections, and you cannot do without a “page”, make sure that there are not too few products on the pages. 80-100 is quite normal. there is no need to make it smaller and show 20-30 products on a page.
• In addition to the paginator, allow the user to choose how many products he wants to see on the page at a time.
• Consider replacing pagination with infinite scroll.