Outlining your options
Here are three options for a series:
Leave whatever you have exactly as-is. Paginated content exists throughout the web and we�ll continue to strive to give searchers the best result, regardless of the page�s rel=�next�/rel=�prev� HTML markup�or lack thereof.
If you have a view-all page, or are considering a view-all page, see our post on View-all in search results.
Hint to Google the relationship between the component URLs of your series with rel=�next� and rel=�prev�. This helps us more accurately index your content and serve to users the most relevant page (commonly the first page). Implementation details below.
Implementing rel=�next� and rel=�prev�
If you prefer option 3 (above) for your site, let�s get started! Let�s say you have content paginated into the URLs:
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4
On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1, you�d include in the <head> section:
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2" />
On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2:
<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1" />
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3" />
On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3:
<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2" />
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4" />
And on the last page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4:
<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3" />
A few points to mention:
The first page only contains rel=�next� and no rel=�prev� markup.
Pages two to the second-to-last page should be doubly-linked with both rel=�next� and rel=�prev� markup.
The last page only contains markup for rel=�prev�, not rel=�next�.
rel=�next� and rel=�prev� values can be either relative or absolute URLs (as allowed by the <link> tag). And, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.
rel=�next� and rel=�prev� only need to be declared within the <head> section, not within the document <body>.
We allow rel=�previous� as a syntactic variant of rel=�prev� links.
rel="next" and rel="previous" on the one hand and rel="canonical" on the other constitute independent concepts. Both declarations can be included in the same page. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2�/>
<link rel="prev" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1&sessionid=123" />
<link rel="next" href="http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3&sessionid=123" />
rel=�prev� and rel=�next� act as hints to Google, not absolute directives.
When implemented incorrectly, such as omitting an expected rel="prev" or rel="next" designation in the series, we'll continue to index the page(s), and rely on our own heuristics to understand your content.
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