SMX East New York 2011: SEO Track – Pagination & SEO

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Coverage of SMX New York 2011 is provided by our guest author Jackie Hole.

The First Session of the ‘SEO Track’ started with some breaking news about pagination options. Speakers included:

  • Maile Ohye, Google Inc.
  • Richard Chavez, PM Digital
  • Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (moderator)

Speaker #1 – Maile Ohye – New Developments in Pagination

Maile Ohye GoogleMaile covers paginated content examples (articles, product pages) and the side effects of paginated content. There are a lot of ways that you can divide how you configure your site but there are some important announcements. You heard it here first!

  • Do you have a view all page /do you not have a view all page?
  • If you do – test for latency, easily navigable, simple product page
  • Users strongly prefer a view all page unless there is a latency or takes too long to load

Announcement #1 - when Google detect that paginated series also contains a view all version they are making a larger effort to return a view all page in search results when appropriate

Announcement #2 – rel=next and rel=previous is connecting the individual pages in your series

What’s different is that they are going to return a component page that is most relevant BUT google will count all pages in the series AND you can use it if you don’t have a view all page

Session Re-cap

If you have view all available

  • Leave as is and let Googlebot index
  • Add rel=canonical to component pages to signal the view all page
  • Use rel=next and rel=prev to override the view all behaviour and that will consolidate all of the indexing properties

The session notes would have been useful as the explanations really need the screens, so in the meantime, visit the Google Webmaster Blog for the official blog post which went live 1 hours before this session – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

See also this article by by Joost de Valk http://yoast.com/rel-next-prev-paginated-archives/

Speaker #2 Richard Chavez – Paginated Categorical Merchandising & SEO

Richard covered some important points regarding why to merchandise in multiple categories, technical challenges with multiple category options, and pagination.

Takeaways

  • Build it right the first time
  • Single database, one unique url to each product no matter where the product is called
  • Pagination at the category level
  • Only include product URLs assigned to the canonical version in XML
  • Sitemap feed
  • Include breadcrumbs
  • Test, Test, Test
  • Measure, Measure, Measure

View Full Summary presentation on slideshare:

More posts about SMX East 2011

SMX East 2011

Be sure to also look at our overview page of SMX East 2011

The coverage of SMX East on State of Search in part made possible by a sponsoring from Majestic SEO who have the largest Link Intelligence database in Search. To get your free trial, give a card to this blogger in person at the conference or drop us an e-mail.

Jackie Hole is an independant Search Marketing consultant for specialising in Paid Search, conversion improvement and organic search for the USA and Canadian markets. with over 12 years experience in online marketing. Jackie is Company Director of 22 Minds Ltd and Carnival Creative Ltd.
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