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Many sites with pagination have an SEO problem. As you add new content to the site, more pages are created and the older content moves from page 1 to page 2 and so on. This produces an issue where (1) Google's page one content is out of date to what users see, (2) page one content can sometimes be duplicate to page two, based on a crawl lag and (3) even with different content, many paginated pages are seen as duplicate by search engines for one reason or another.
A supporters only WebmasterWorld thread (paid access required for link) describes this problem. Senior member, g1smd, has tried a reverse pagination method to try to solve the issues.
By reverse pagination, I mean, that instead of putting new content on page one, you keep the page number you assigned for the new content as it ages. So for example, content piece A was assigned page number X, as that content A gets older and newer content comes, the page number for X remains page number X. Maybe you use time based URLs to achieve this or maybe just some unique string of some sorts.
g1smd said "I've done that with a site, and the URL stability seems to result in much better site indexing."
What do you think of this and have you tried any alternatives?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Michael Martinez
04/06/2010 04:08 pm
This is an old issue that was long resolved by improved site architecture. People keep blindly assuming that if they create the content the search engines will figure it out. Good SEO calls for careful planning of site architecture.
Jaan Kanellis
04/06/2010 09:13 pm
I think a recent post from MM himself will help people with this: http://www.seo-theory.com/2010/03/30/how-many-pages-should-a-search-engine-index/
Marcel
04/15/2010 11:50 am
Why not noindex,follow those pagination pages? It solves all three issues metioned in this post.. and which user is searching for pagination pages? They are looking for the pages those pagination pages link to, right?
Paul
05/17/2010 01:46 pm
I suggest you have a read of my blog post at http://www.epiphanysolutions.co.uk/blog/the-impact-of-pagination-on-seo/ I outline some of the most common ways into dealing with the SEO issues of pagination along with how and when each solution should be used :)