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Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

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Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#31

Post by cooperadymas »

WillyF wrote: post #14

Google continues to leverage its power to provide a better experience for their users as they click on links they find through search. This is one example, and First Click Free is another. The flip side of this is that publishers are now offering an inferior experience to users who navigate directly to their sites. If I type in NYTimes.com and start browsing through articles because I'm a big fan of The New York Time…

Making the search experience better for their users by utilizing a feature the website provides (full page view versus pagination) is not strong arming publishers. The websites already give that same experience option, Google is just attempting to make the web a smarter place. What's wrong with that?

They could be utilizing their search dominance to do a lot more harm than good. However, almost everything they do helps make the web better, even if it does push their bottom line. That's business.

Most businesses don't care about your loyalty to other brands. Why should they? Google, on the other hand, has made a lot of strides toward giving big brands benefits in the search results. I'm not sure whether this is good or bad, but saying they reward people who have no brand loyalty is untrue.

Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#32

Post by tadfisher »

guldi wrote: post #25

Is there a good reason to paginate anything these days? The fact that publishers make people click on a 12pt link to read the next "page", and thus view more ads, is pretty insane. If you aren't using infinite scrolling, chances are you're doing it wrong.

Web comics, documentation, anything where clicking 'back' should get you to the position you were browsing last without waiting for an ajax call, etc. These all benefit from pagination.

Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#33

Post by rue »

infinity wrote: post #29
cobralibre wrote: post #18

I haven't thought about rel="next" and rel="prev" since the middle of the last decade, but I recall that the blogging community used these attributes in semantically different way. Instead of marking parts of a single unit of content, rel="next" and rel="prev" were used to mark the next document in a chronological series . IMO, this latter usage is consistent with both HTML 4 and HTML5 semantics. I suppose Google's a…

I agree with you, the HTML 4.01 specification says that "next" refers to the next document in a linear sequence of documents. A sequence of documents ordered chronologically would be a linear sequence, like the sequence of blog articles published on a certain blog. The individual articles could be regarded as "stand alone" documents and do not require the other articles in the sequence for some "completeness". The Go…

You can certainly have multiple entry points, although you can't then statically model it with just prev in a simple manner.

Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#34

Post by blahedo »

mithaler wrote: post #7
_delirium wrote: post #2

An interesting aspect is if Google's treatment of these links incentivizes publishers to add them, then browsers (or browser extensions) will also be able to use them to defeat the purpose of pagination in the first place, e.g. by having something like Readability slurp all the pages into a view-all page.

Well, not just that. I imagine browsers implementing keyboard shortcuts that automatically go to the next or previous pages.

For probably five or six years now, OmniWeb (for Mac) has had a feature that scanned the page for something that looked like a "next" link, and chooses it if you press Enter (a distinct key from Return on Mac keyboards). Very useful for browsing multi-page documents and for crawling webcomic archives.

Re: Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”

#35

Post by repsilat »

infinity wrote: post #29
cobralibre wrote: post #18

I haven't thought about rel="next" and rel="prev" since the middle of the last decade, but I recall that the blogging community used these attributes in semantically different way. Instead of marking parts of a single unit of content, rel="next" and rel="prev" were used to mark the next document in a chronological series . IMO, this latter usage is consistent with both HTML 4 and HTML5 semantics. I suppose Google's a…

I agree with you, the HTML 4.01 specification says that "next" refers to the next document in a linear sequence of documents. A sequence of documents ordered chronologically would be a linear sequence, like the sequence of blog articles published on a certain blog. The individual articles could be regarded as "stand alone" documents and do not require the other articles in the sequence for some "completeness". The Go…

Is this just a matter of the definitions of "page" and "document"? I haven't read the specification, but I wouldn't be surprised if it called webpages "documents".
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