SMX Live: Pagination & SEO

Sep 15, 2011 - 8:59 am 0 by
Filed Under SMX East 2011

Live Blogging Coverage SMXBelow is live coverage of the Pagination & SEO panel from the SMX East 2011 conference.

Disclaimer: The coverage is brought to you in real time, using a custom live blogging tool. Feel free to ask questions or leave comments for inclusion into the live coverage. During the live event, live notes will auto-scroll with newest entries at top. After the session is complete the archive version will have the oldest entries at the top. We ask you to please excuse any typos, as these are live notes.

Finished Auto-Refresh: Off
Barry Schwartz: 8:01:29 am
Starting in a second...
Barry Schwartz: 8:01:38 am
Richard Chavez, Sr. Director, SEO, PM Digital
Vanessa Fox, Contributing Editor, Search Engine Land (@vanessafox)
Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc. (@maileohye)
Barry Schwartz: 8:02:54 am
FYI, Google announced two new things today they will be talking about
Barry Schwartz: 8:02:56 am
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
Barry Schwartz: 8:03:02 am
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html
Barry Schwartz: 8:03:39 am
Maile Ohye from Google is going to talk about it...
Barry Schwartz: 8:03:59 am
But first up is Richard and then Maile will talk about the new features
Barry Schwartz: 8:06:06 am
Why merchandise your products in multiple categories?
Barry Schwartz: 8:06:26 am
Consumers find things from different ways, by category, need, etc.
Barry Schwartz: 8:07:52 am
So targeting various target points for consumers, different entry ways, leads to more consumers and customers.
Barry Schwartz: 8:08:39 am
Technical challenges: (1) It can lead to duplicate content for product URLs and (2) Pagination for each merchandising option can lead to dup content also.
Barry Schwartz: 8:09:39 am
He shows some examples of rankings reports in various search engines...
Barry Schwartz: 8:10:48 am
Best solution is to build it right from the first time...
Barry Schwartz: 8:10:59 am
Unqiue URLs for each product no matter of the leading page.
Barry Schwartz: 8:11:18 am
PAginate at the category level and canonical to the root page
Barry Schwartz: 8:11:27 am
Include product URLS in XML sitemaps
Barry Schwartz: 8:12:29 am
click for full size
Barry Schwartz: 8:13:14 am
He shows more examples of sites that have their own products and also syndicate it to Amazon and compare the rankings.
Barry Schwartz: 8:13:36 am
Working with existing sites:
Barry Schwartz: 8:13:50 am
(1) Rel = canonical in those places
Barry Schwartz: 8:14:00 am
(2) XML Sitemap feeds for one product URL
Barry Schwartz: 8:14:14 am
(3) Pagination also, point to the main page
Barry Schwartz: 8:15:39 am
Also try pagination via AJAX, if you go this route, make sure you provide an XML feed to Google. and use the Google AJAX specification.
Barry Schwartz: 8:16:00 am
He showed another chart of a site using AJAX based pagination which does well.
Barry Schwartz: 8:16:05 am
Takeaways:
Barry Schwartz: 8:16:20 am
There are challenges but there are huge advantages
Barry Schwartz: 8:16:29 am
The best bet is to build it right the first time.
Barry Schwartz: 8:16:45 am
With exisiting sites, use canonical tags,
Barry Schwartz: 8:16:59 am
Pagnination at category level to point to page 1 page
Barry Schwartz: 8:18:00 am
That is all for Richard
Barry Schwartz: 8:18:23 am
Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer, Google Inc. (@maileohye) is now up
Barry Schwartz: 8:18:41 am
click for full size
Barry Schwartz: 8:19:15 am
She will tell us about new pagination options...
Barry Schwartz: 8:20:05 am
This pagination thing has been an ongoing issue and they heard a ton of feedback from webmasters to come up with a solution...
Barry Schwartz: 8:21:55 am
She shows how pagination works, from page 1, to page 2, to page 3... one is a single article split into two or three pages. or product pages, which has pagination.
Barry Schwartz: 8:22:05 am
Also, forum threads fall into this
Barry Schwartz: 8:23:01 am
Pagination side effects: indexing properties, such as links, diluted into several pages AND most relevant page in the series may not be reflected search results
Barry Schwartz: 8:24:02 am
You might have a "view all" available on the page.... obviously make sure it doesnt take too long to load the page and the link is easy to find. Or you may not have a view all.
Barry Schwartz: 8:24:45 am
Searchers prefer the view all page... Studies proved this...
Barry Schwartz: 8:25:16 am
That is, if the view all page doesn't take too long to load.
Barry Schwartz: 8:25:40 am
So now, Google will serve searchers the "view all" page by default, when they think it is paginated and there is a view all.
Barry Schwartz: 8:26:04 am
The good thing to note, the indexing properties, such as links, will all be passed automatically.
Barry Schwartz: 8:26:08 am
This is awesome.
Barry Schwartz: 8:27:10 am
Option 2: no view all page
Barry Schwartz: 8:27:51 am
Rel="next" and Rel="prev" option, it is a standard markup and is in HTML
Barry Schwartz: 8:28:13 am
So do this from page one to page two to page three and so on.
Barry Schwartz: 8:29:18 am
click for full size
Barry Schwartz: 8:29:29 am
More on this at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html I can't cover it all
Barry Schwartz: 8:29:59 am
Declare in the head section of the page, page two to the second to last page should be doubly linked with both rel next and prev
Barry Schwartz: 8:30:13 am
If you do not have a view all page, you can implement this.
Barry Schwartz: 8:30:23 am
If you have the view all, you can do both
Barry Schwartz: 8:30:42 am
Why use rel next and rel prev rather than rel canonical to page one?
Barry Schwartz: 8:31:12 am
Rel canonical is for duplicate content and pagniated results are not always duplicate content.
Barry Schwartz: 8:31:24 am
For session ID URLs use rel canonical
Barry Schwartz: 8:32:13 am
rel canonical only indexes content from the canonical URL
Barry Schwartz: 8:32:36 am
So since the other pages have different content, they won't pick it up using rel canonical
Barry Schwartz: 8:32:55 am
So that is where rel next and previous come in, it is like a series and sequence of content, which link all the content into one
Barry Schwartz: 8:33:44 am
This is awesome!
Barry Schwartz: 8:35:33 am
Component URLs in the series should agree with pre/next values.
Barry Schwartz: 8:35:59 am
This is separate from rel canonical. It can be used with it or without it.
Barry Schwartz: 8:36:40 am
Searchers preview view all page and google will try to serve that page
Barry Schwartz: 8:36:53 am
They also now have rel prev and next
Barry Schwartz: 8:37:27 am
She is recapping, but again, all of this is on the blog at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
Barry Schwartz: 8:41:17 am
Q&A time...
Barry Schwartz: 8:41:51 am
How long should the view all page take to load? 2-3 seconds is probably a good benchmark but there is no one number.
Barry Schwartz: 8:43:34 am
Any ideas what you want me to cover next? http://searchmarketingexpo.com/east/2011/full_agenda3
Barry Schwartz: 8:48:18 am
I do not think Bing supports this yet, but they can, if they want..
Barry Schwartz: 8:55:51 am
Some really good technical implementation Qs.
Barry Schwartz: 8:56:15 am
Such as, if you have a 100 paginated pages and then removed X products, so now you have 92 pages.
Barry Schwartz: 8:57:36 am
One other Q is how Google Webmaster tools shows duplicate title tags, so it still make show those issues, but Google will work on fixing those reports.
Barry Schwartz: 9:00:45 am
It is still important for each page on the paginated results to have unique title tags, Google may return page 3 if the title tag makes sense to return.
Barry Schwartz: 9:02:03 am
Most likely, it will be page one as the page that is served
Barry Schwartz: 9:06:50 am
Someone asked if this can be used for paid search. Maile said, I have no clue what they do on paid search.
Barry Schwartz: 9:14:24 am
Next session in 15 minutes at 10:30am EDT.
 

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