Organization of content on a website is very important for search engine index-ability. It can be a challenge to create a system that is friendly to both human visitors and search engine bots. A common example is a list of articles. Even with categories, over time there can become a huge amount of articles within any given category. Then what? You don’t want an enormous page with 1000 article titles on it…do you? So, of course, you use pagination. The most common way is to have multiple links at the bottom (and sometimes top) of the list such as that allow users to navigate through the various pages within a category. This works well for users, but here is why it isn’t so good for search engines:
Your first category page will have links to the first 10 articles. This first category page probably has multiple links to it (site footer, navigation) such as “Visit Article Category 1″. So, to make this easy to understand, let’s say we have a 100 page website. Each page has a link to the category pages in the site footer. Therefore each category page will have 100 internal links. All the articles listed on the first page of the category will only ever be 2 clicks away for a user. So….what about the articles that are listed on page 2, page 3, etc of that category? Well, if this particular category had 10 pages, then page 2 of that category would only have 10 internal links. And, all the links would be labeled as “2″. Not a very good description of the page for the search engines. Also, the articles listed on these secondary pages are 3 clicks away, rather than 2 (if we start on the home page….1 click on the footer link to the category page, 1 click on the “2″ to go to page 2, then 1 click on the article link). You are essentially telling search engines that you place less value on the articles listed on page 2 then the articles listed on page 1.
The best fix for this problem is to break down articles into manageable categories that are small enough to list on articles in the category. However, this may not be possible for websites with a huge number of articles so you may also want to consider a better navigational table than 1 2 3 4….. Try something like Category A Page 2, Category A Page 3, etc. This way, at least you are referencing your deeper category pages with relevant text. You can also link to the secondary pages from places like your sitemap and maybe even the footer if it doesn’t bulk it up too much. That way, you minimize the damage caused by burying your secondary category pages with pagination.
Tags: seo, pagination, search engine indexing