I haven't had too much cause to use pagination in the past, being able to use other methods to achieve my results (or just not having enough pages to warrant using it).

However, converting a blog today showed me some serious issues with paginated pages.

Code: Select all

<cms:paginator />

This does not make use of rel="next" or "prev", while we can bypass this from coding the pagination ourselves, it would be nice since the paginator tag handles a lot of things for us.

Paginated pages (ex: http://www.example.com/blog/?pg=3) to google is just a copy of the original list-view page with a different url (albeit a parameter). I may be wrong (If so, please correct me as I did spend quite a while searching for an answer or documentation) but I cannot find any way to easily reflect the page number inside the title (only if the page is paginated) within couch. To clarify: An if statement checking if the current page/view is a paginated one (such as page 2). while not necessarily in the context of the <cms:pages> tag that lists the pages within the template.

The most important point is the URL rewriting of paginated pages. There is none - meaning a prettyURL site with pagination would be forced to use things such as "www.example.com/blog/?pg=2" rather than something such as "www.example.com/blog/page/2/" (If pagination is correctly setup using next/prev rel's on the pagination links and page titles etc are correctly reflecting, this is much better for SEO in terms of general appeal to the site, ease of use and cleanness. It also benefits by helping google to understand where the pagination starts and ends and tells them what type of content the pages have. (Which is important because google can often mistake paginated pages as duplicated content, since they usually display a lot of duplicated content save for the small list they're paginating.)

I ask here in case KK sheds some light that may help us all in the future regarding PrettyURLs and determining if the view is "paginated" rather than just the base list-view.

[KK]

I am not an SEO expert by any stretch of imagination but following is what I have gathered about SEO in context of listing pages and pagination -

Almost all listing-pages (e.g. categories, tags, archives, posts by users etc.) *are* duplicate content (the real stuff being the page-view of actual items being listed).

Same applies for paginated listing - i.e. all '?pg=2, ?pg=3' kind of pages.

Not only are they duplicate contents but are also transient - Think about it, if a www.example.com/blog/?pg=3 shows up in a search result and the visitor bookmarks it, the next time she visits the bookmarked link she is not likely to find any of the original content there as later posts would have replaced the ones she saw originally (assuming you update your site regularly).

So you'd really want to set 'no-index' on them to make Google skip the pages altogether from showing in search result (mind you, the single posts being listed in these pages will still be followed and indexed by Google).

The only exception could be the very first page in the paginated series *if* you have chosen to put some unique content there e.g. a textual description of the category being shown.

So the only SEO point that one needs to bother about list pages (particularly the paginated ones) is to put a 'no-index' meta directive in them.

If you need to make the very first paginated skip this directive, use <cms:gpc 'pg' method='get' /> to make the decision.

Regarding URL rewriting of paginated pages, having URLs like "www.example.com/blog/page/2/", I agree will appear more user friendly but, in the end, have no SEO implications (as these pages are not meant for Google to be indexed, only for the visitors to see).

As things stand right now, the "/blog/page/2/" format will clash with the 'folders' and 'nested-pages' URLs so I don't think I'll be doing anything about those only to improve the URLs cosmetically.

Finally you mentioned -

<cms:paginator />
does not make use of rel="next" or "prev"

True. I agree that is something that should be looked into.
However, for the time-being please try the following -

Code: Select all

<cms:paginator>
    <cms:dump />
</cms:paginator>

By using the tag-pair version, you can easily create any kind of markup for the paginator as you desire - including the 'rel' parameter you wish to have.

Those were my thoughts. Please feel free to contend my conclusions.

[KK]

Adding a little more to the use of 'rel' in pagination -

According to Google (https://support.google.com/webmasters/a ... 3744?hl=en), this would be useful in cases, for example, where we break a single post into multiple pages (e.g. divide a long article into several shorter pages).

In Couch this is not what cms:paginator can be used for so we could use the other advice of Google -

Do nothing. Paginated content is very common, and Google does a good job returning the most relevant results to users, regardless of whether content is divided into multiple pages.

[trendoman]

I like very much the current urls. Friendly. Clean.
This really hit me:

Think about it, if a www.example.com/blog/?pg=3 shows up in a search result and the visitor bookmarks it, the next time she visits the bookmarked link she is not likely to find any of the original content there as later posts would have replaced the ones she saw originally (assuming you update your site regularly).

I believe it is nice to let visitor bookmark anything on site and get back to exactly this state of browsing.