Should You Worry About Google’s Announcement on Pagination?

We all take great care in designing our website and see that it is Search Engine Optimised (SEO). But, what if a particular feature you think impacts the SEO but turns out to be of no use, it is disappointing. Such is the case with Google’s recent announcement of retiring rel=next and rel=prev also known as ‘pagination’.

What is Pagination?

For those who are not familiar with pagination, here is a small description.

Pagination is adding consecutive numbers to web pages with content to make them more user-friendly. Generally, long-articles are broken down and paginated to make them easy to read for the readers.

Google’s Sudden Announcement:

In a recent interview, John Mueller, the senior webmaster trends analyst at Google announced that the search engine will no longer support pagination (rel=next and rel=prev). He had, in fact, stated that they have recently realized that pagination was not being supported for some years now. Hence the sudden announcement to the community.

Will It Affect Your SEO?

Mueller says that there is no need to worry about the announcement. He says, if what you have been doing with pagination has not caused any trouble then it is fine to continue it. Also, he said that there is no need for removing all the pagination and having one giant page.

He recommends not to discontinue pagination yet. Though there will be no problem with Google, other search engines use pagination for different activities. So, it still has relevance with other search engines.

On Crawling Issue:

For the majority of the websites, the retirement of pagination is not going to have an impact on crawling of Google bots. If you find such issues, Mueller recommends using third-party tools to solve the issue.

No Need To Worry:

In the end, there is no need to worry over Google’s announcement. Pagination, now may not be useful as an SEO tool, but it certainly has benefit in the form of user-friendliness. Use it appropriately and make your content reader feel comfortable.