Google Pagination rel Link Element Support

In today’s of series of updates and announcements by Google – an absolute gem popped up [1]. Handling of previous and next links in paginated navigation via rel [2]. Wow. This solves so many problems and headaches with majority of e-Commerce and catalogue driven sites but also with news and article websites which split their content into several  pages. According to Google the tags act much like rel=”canonical”, and treat it as a “hint” rather than a directive (such as 301 redirect). This means Google reserves right to disobey the advice if they wish. Keep in mind, however, a “view all” page may be an exception in the way this is handled [3].

rel=”next” and rel=”prev”

References:

[1] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

[2] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/links.html#sequential-link-types

[3] http://dejanseo.com.au/google-view-all-in-search-results/