Coverage of SMX New York 2011 is provided by our guest author Jackie Hole.
The First Session of the ‘SEO Track’ started with some breaking news about pagination options. Speakers included:
- Maile Ohye, Google Inc.
- Richard Chavez, PM Digital
- Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (moderator)
Speaker #1 – Maile Ohye – New Developments in Pagination
Maile covers paginated content examples (articles, product pages) and the side effects of paginated content. There are a lot of ways that you can divide how you configure your site but there are some important announcements. You heard it here first!
- Do you have a view all page /do you not have a view all page?
- If you do – test for latency, easily navigable, simple product page
- Users strongly prefer a view all page unless there is a latency or takes too long to load
Announcement #1 – when Google detect that paginated series also contains a view all version they are making a larger effort to return a view all page in search results when appropriate
Announcement #2 – rel=next and rel=previous is connecting the individual pages in your series
What’s different is that they are going to return a component page that is most relevant BUT google will count all pages in the series AND you can use it if you don’t have a view all page
Session Re-cap
If you have view all available
- Leave as is and let Googlebot index
- Add rel=canonical to component pages to signal the view all page
- Use rel=next and rel=prev to override the view all behaviour and that will consolidate all of the indexing properties
The session notes would have been useful as the explanations really need the screens, so in the meantime, visit the Google Webmaster Blog for the official blog post which went live 1 hours before this session – http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
See also this article by by Joost de Valk http://yoast.com/rel-next-prev-paginated-archives/
Speaker #2 Richard Chavez – Paginated Categorical Merchandising & SEO
Richard covered some important points regarding why to merchandise in multiple categories, technical challenges with multiple category options, and pagination.
Takeaways
- Build it right the first time
- Single database, one unique url to each product no matter where the product is called
- Pagination at the category level
- Only include product URLs assigned to the canonical version in XML
- Sitemap feed
- Include breadcrumbs
- Test, Test, Test
- Measure, Measure, Measure
View Full Summary presentation on slideshare:
More posts about SMX East 2011
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