An SEO professional asked John Mueller the following question about paginated pages as a submitted question in a hangout:
Is linking paginated pages better sequentially (such as showing next/prev) when compared to showing more number of pages on a paginated page?
John explained that for pagination, it’s really more of a preference for people in terms of how they implement pagination.
He went further and said that because they are just links between pages, Google doesn’t differentiate between normal links and paginated links.
Instead, Google will just see links to pages.
However, if you implement sequential linking, what will happen here is that the first page of the site will have stronger signals in the sense that the main content links to the first page, and then it incrementally drops and drops as Google crawls through the pagination set.
If you link to a bunch of different pages almost immediately, then you’re spreading out all of the link equity much faster.
He also expounded that these are mostly SEO tweaks, and that Google will eventually find all of these links to these pages anyway.
This happens at approximately the 50:26 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
“Is linking pagination pages sequentially, showing only the Next and Previous, better than showing more number of pages on a paginated page?”
John (Answer) 50:38
I don’t think any of these approaches are really better or worse in the sense that, for the longest time, we didn’t have any guidance on pagination. And it seemed to just work well for search. So it felt like something where we don’t actually have to tell people what exactly to do.
The important thing I think about pagination to keep in mind is that these are essentially just links between pages. And for the most part, our systems don’t go in and try to figure out, oh, this is a paginated set of pages so I will do something special here. But rather, they see links to other pages. And you can have one page that links to the next page and the previous page, which is just kind of like other pages and links.
Or you can have one page that links to a bunch of next pages, if you have kind of like a set of next pages. And both of those are reasonable approaches to take, in that we can crawl and find all of those pages. If you link sequentially, what will generally happen is the first page of your site will have a lot stronger signals in the sense that your main content links to the first page and then it kind of like incrementally drops and drops and drops as it’s read–goes through the pagination set.
So you’re kind of focusing more on the first pages of the set. Whereas if you link to a bunch of different pages immediately, then you’re kind of like spreading it out a lot faster. But I think overall, these are almost like SEO tweaks, they don’t play a big role for most sites in the sense that we can find all of these pages anyway, we can find them and follow the links on those pages as well. It’s not something that you need to do in any particular way.
SEO Professional 8 52:34
A quick follow up on this. So we have thousands of authors and each author, some of them might have hundreds of pages. Now, when a new story comes in, page two changes, because everything gets sort of cascading down. In that case, has Google recrawled everything or…? And we know that the links on the deeper pages have already been indexed. Are there any guidelines around that? Or should we just expect Google to recrawl? Because everybody gets reshuffled every day? Across hundreds…what…?
John 53:04
Yeah, I, I think in practice, what you’ll notice is that we will crawl the first page of the set a little bit more often than the other pages. And we’ll probably recrawl the other pages from time to time, but we won’t recrawl them immediately. So probably you would see that. Also, if you look at the log files for your site, and kind of follow along what happens when, when a new article is posted, and it’s listed on these pages. How does the crawling of the pagination actually change? And my guess is 90% of the crawling will be on the first pages of those sets.
SEO Professional 8 53:47
So we are right to put a no-crawl on, let’s say, after page number 100? You know, because…
John 53:53
Sure, sure, yeah.
