Google: Rel=prev/next Is Not An Indexing Signal Anymore; Help Docs Removed

Mar 21, 2019 • 7:49 am | comments (18) by | Filed Under Google Search Engine Optimization
 

Google Next Prev

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 Also, the blog post about it from 2011 in bold reads at the top "Note: The information in this post is outdated.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:

click for full size

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:

Wow - Google stopped using it completely!

Google is now telling people to go with single page content going forward where possible:

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:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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