Below is live coverage of the Pagination & SEO panel from the SMX East 2011 conference.
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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)
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
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
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
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.
