Pagination simplifies the information hierarchy and help users not only to navigate but also to know how many pages they can access to. Accordingly, it gives them back the control that infinite scroll takes from them.
Pagination issues can affect any website, from a simple blog to a heavy e-commerce site. They are not only an important element in web design but also in SEO and enhancing the User Experience. In this post, we’ll go over some best practices for implementing pagination for SEO and UX.
Good practices of Pagination Design :
Good practices of Pagination Design :
- Provide large clickable areas
- Not use underlines
- Identify the current page
- Space out page links
- Provide Previous and Next links
- Use First and Last links (where applicable)
Pagination for SEO :
Pagination is not only for usability’s reason. It can affect two critical elements of search engine accessibility: Crawler limitations and Duplicate Problems. And to avoid these issues, it’s recommended to the following:
- Have no more than 100 links (Google’s recommendation). In fact, having a large number of links on a page affects robot’s crawl efficiency.
- Increase the number of categories, which will decrease the depth of each paginated series.
- Create a separate “View-All” page apart from the paginated series and include all of the items within this single page. Once the view-all-page created, add the rel=”canonical” tag within the head section.
- Remove your paginated content from the index, by using adding the noindex tag to the head section :
- Use HTML5’s History API to change the URL as new pages are loaded.
- Whether you are using the Infinite Crawl or the pagination, include the new URLs in your sitemap so search engines can find, crawl and index your content.
- If you use the View More/Less result, make sure to remove the duplicate title tags. You can find them in the HTML Improvements section under Search Appearance when using Google Search Console.
