Google finally decided to tell the search community that rel=”next” and rel=”prev” haven’t been used in years.
John Mueller from Google broke the news on Twitter earlier today:
We noticed that we weren't using rel-next/prev in indexing for a number of years now, so we thought we might as well remove the docs :).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 21, 2019
Shortly after, the Google Webmasters account made an official announcement:
Spring cleaning!
As we evaluated our indexing signals, we decided to retire rel=prev/next.
Studies show that users love single-page content, aim for that when possible, but multi-part is also fine for Google Search. Know and do what's best for *your* users! #springiscoming pic.twitter.com/hCODPoKgKp— Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) March 21, 2019
Google has long recommended using rel=prev/next markup when publishing a paginated series of web pages.
The markup would communicate to Google that the individual pages are all part of the same series.
Rel=prev/next markup also sent signals to Google about which page in the series is first, second, third, and so on.
Now, Google doesn’t support the markup at all.
We don't use link-rel-next/prev at all.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 21, 2019
For years (apparently) Google hasn’t been using signals from rel=prev/next when indexing content in search results.
What has Google been doing instead?
No More Rel=prev/next
Google has been indexing content as it’s found by Google’s crawlers, Mueller says.
In other words, web pages in a series are indexed the same as any other piece of single-page content.
For the most part, we just index the pages as we find them, so as we've recommended for a long time, it's good to make sure that all pages can stand on their own.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 21, 2019
As it turns out, publishers are good at sending the appropriate signals to Google without rel=prev/next.
Since it hasn't been used for a while, it seems like most sites are doing pagination in reasonable ways that work regardsless of these links. People make good sites, for a large part :).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 21, 2019
Publishers can send signals to Google in other ways, such as linking to other pages of a series within the body content.
Think about how you would communicate to a searcher that the page they landed on is part 3 out of 5 in a series.
When the pagination is obvious to a reader it should be obvious to Google as well.
Another option is to create more single-page content instead of paginated content. Google says users prefer it, although multi-page content is still acceptable for search.
