Yesterday during the webmaster hangout, I noticed that the documentation on "Indicating paginated content to Google" that talks about rel=next/prev is now gone, 404ing. Also, the blog post about it from 2011 in bold reads at the top "Note: The information in this post is outdated. Rel=prev/next is not an indexing signal anymore."
Here is a screen shot:
I wonder what changes are happening around this? I have not heard anything from Google's John Mueller about this and we did bring up rel=next/prev twice in the Google hangout from the other day. He didn't mention it when we said the page was 404ing.
Update: John said that Google hasn't been using them for indexing for a couple years now, so they removed it from the docs:
We noticed that we weren't using rel-next/prev in indexing for a number of years now, so we thought we might as well remove the docs :).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 21, 2019
For the most part, we just index the pages as we find them, so as we've recommended for a long time, it's good to make sure that all pages can stand on their own.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 21, 2019
Since it hasn't been used for a while, it seems like most sites are doing pagination in reasonable ways that work regardsless of these links. People make good sites, for a large part :).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 21, 2019
Wow - Google stopped using it completely!
We don't use link-rel-next/prev at all.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 21, 2019
Google is now telling people to go with single page content going forward where possible:
Spring cleaning!
— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) March 21, 2019
As we evaluated our indexing signals, we decided to retire rel=prev/next.
Studies show that users love single-page content, aim for that when possible, but multi-part is also fine for Google Search. Know and do what's best for *your* users! #springiscoming pic.twitter.com/hCODPoKgKp
Just weird.
So beware, something is changing to how Google handles rel=next/prev. You can see the original story on this over here.
Additional hat tip to:
FYI G doesn't support rel=next/prev (apperently it hasn't for years). It treats paginted pages just like any other page on your website.
— Adam Gent 👾🤖👓 (@Adoubleagent) March 21, 2019
The offcial documentation has been removed from the GSC help docs and the blog post highlight it's out of date.
More info to come...@JohnMu pic.twitter.com/eQpT62lVpV
Forum discussion at Twitter.
