Pagination is One of the Best SEO Practices to Improve the Search Engine Accessibility of Websites
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010Pagination is a method of segmenting links to the content of web pages. It is a good SEO with impact on the search engine ranking of websites. The search engine accessibility of a website is not beyond the influence of pagination. The segmentation of links to the website content through pagination reduces the time of crawling web pages for search engine spiders. It is one of the best practices to make search engine bots reach the content-rich pages in only a few clicks. It also impacts Google’s algorithmic ranking system.
Why Pagination is a Must Requirement
An easy access to the core of the website content for search engine spiders is the greatest benefit of pagination. A user-friendly and easily accessible website has to be search engine friendly at any cost. In accordance with Google’s norms, pages that contain no more than one hundred internal or external links are easily accessible, efficiently crawlable and certainly indexable. What makes pagination essential is a need to facilitate the access of search engine crawlers to the content-rich pages of a website containing hundreds or thousands of links.
It is essential to determine the number of pages of results that should be displayed in the pagination. Determining the number of links that an average results page will display is imperative, too. The links to the content should be segmented and categorized properly. The improper pagination at times leads to content duplication that is search engines’ pet hate. There are several options to execute pagination with an eye to perfection.
In some cases, there are many results pages and links to segment them under subcategories. When the number of pages and links is too large to be paginated, create more subcategories to do away with the problem. The pagination of links to the content through sub categorization is a good SEO with enhancement of a website’s search engine health. Sometimes, it is not enough to create a number of sub categories. If a website is too large, extensive pagination is your requirement. Here are some dos to follow and some don’ts to avoid in such cases.
Some Dos for Pagination
Keep one hundred as the link capacity of each page. Link to the content of as many pages as possible under one category. Make sure to keep the pages with newer content at the peak of the results list. It will boost the flow of link juice to those pages. Make sure linking to the relevant categories and subcategories in order to keep up the flow of link juice throughout the entire site. Don’t forget to link back to the top results pages from each paginated URLs.
Some Don’ts for Pagination
Getting only a few paginated pages and links displayed is among the don’ts. It is one of the don’ts to link to the pages in the front and at the end of a pagination list because it keeps the link juice flowing only to the beginning and the end of the list. Randomizing the paginated results over and again to distribute link juice throughout the site is a don’t. A website with static architecture is easy to be accessed, crawled and indexed. Using AJAX to get into the deep of the website content is among the don’ts from SEO perspectives. In most of cases, the content of titles and Meta descriptions for paginated results is copied from the top page. It is the bane of a site’s search engine health as it leads to duplicate content issues.