
Pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev” - barredo
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
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cobralibre
I haven't thought about rel="next" and rel="prev" since the middle of the last
decade, but I recall that the blogging community used these attributes in
semantically different way. Instead of marking parts of a single unit of
content, rel="next" and rel="prev" were used to mark the _next document in a
chronological series_.

IMO, this latter usage is consistent with both HTML 4 and HTML5 semantics. I
suppose Google's approach can be read as consistent with the specs, too, but
either usage takes a different interpretation of "a document" and the
relationships in a series of documents.

<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links>

[http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#sequential-
link-t...](http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#sequential-link-types)

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infinity
I agree with you, the HTML 4.01 specification says that "next" refers to the
next document in a linear sequence of documents. A sequence of documents
ordered chronologically would be a linear sequence, like the sequence of blog
articles published on a certain blog. The individual articles could be
regarded as "stand alone" documents and do not require the other articles in
the sequence for some "completeness".

The Google article talks mainly about paginated content and mentions that it
comes in different forms. The examples given in the article suggest that here
we have a sequence of pages where we should or could have only one document,
like in the example of the forum thread: it may consist of many pages, ordered
in a linear fashion, but individual pages of the thread might be somehow
incomplete. The whole thread is the document. I think that this interpretation
is different from the interpretation of next/prev indicating a chronologically
ordered sequence.

The article mentions also "The first page":

>>The first page only contains rel=”next” and no rel=”prev” markup.<<

"The first page" means that there is only one. Could we have more than one
first page as entry point into the sequence? Like a story with different
possible beginnings converging to a common end?

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repsilat
Is this just a matter of the definitions of "page" and "document"? I haven't
read the specification, but I wouldn't be surprised if it called webpages
"documents".

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_delirium
An interesting aspect is if Google's treatment of these links incentivizes
publishers to add them, then browsers (or browser extensions) will also be
able to use them to defeat the purpose of pagination in the first place, e.g.
by having something like Readability slurp all the pages into a view-all page.

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mithaler
Well, not just that. I imagine browsers implementing keyboard shortcuts that
automatically go to the next or previous pages.

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pornel
Opera has that already — Forward button becomes "Fast Forward" and if you use
Spacebar to scroll to the bottom, it will automatically follow "next" link.

Ironically, HTML5 recently dropped bunch of link relationships because of lack
of browser and search engine support.

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WillyF
Google continues to leverage its power to provide a better experience for
their users as they click on links they find through search. This is one
example, and First Click Free is another.

The flip side of this is that publishers are now offering an inferior
experience to users who navigate directly to their sites. If I type in
NYTimes.com and start browsing through articles because I'm a big fan of The
New York Times, I'm treated worse (I have to deal with an article limit and
pagination) than if I stumble on their articles through Google. Google is
giving more and more value to brands, while creating an atmosphere that
rewards people who have no brand loyalty (except to Google).

Google has been strong-arming publishers for a long time. Generally it has
made the Internet a better place, but it still makes me nervous (especially as
a publisher). Google seems to be pushing to eliminate more and more tactics
that are profitable for publishers (and generally bad for users). I doubt that
Google will kill the goose that laid the golden egg, but you have to think
that publishers are going to start to push back if it goes much further.

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cooperadymas
Making the search experience better for their users by utilizing a feature the
website provides (full page view versus pagination) is not strong arming
publishers. The websites already give that same experience option, Google is
just attempting to make the web a smarter place. What's wrong with that?

They could be utilizing their search dominance to do a lot more harm than
good. However, almost everything they do helps make the web better, even if it
does push their bottom line. That's business.

Most businesses don't care about your loyalty to other brands. Why should
they? Google, on the other hand, has made a lot of strides toward giving big
brands benefits in the search results. I'm not sure whether this is good or
bad, but saying they reward people who have no brand loyalty is untrue.

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there
i implemented these on a site a while back after an opera user requested it,
because apparently opera has a keyboard shortcut or something to automatically
go to the next/previous pages that use these tags.

what i found was that opera started doing a pre-fetch on them as soon as i
added the tags, so every time an opera user would visit the site, they would
fetch two pages. i had to remove the tags to cut down on the resource usage.

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ineedtosleep
What was your percentage of Opera users, if you don't mind me asking? If it's
only a very small percentage, was the increase in resource usage really that
significant?

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there
it was a small percentage, but the pages being requested were accessing
external resources that i had to pay for on a per-view basis. paying for those
views without actually showing anything to the user was wasteful.

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guldi
Is there a good reason to paginate anything these days? The fact that
publishers make people click on a 12pt link to read the next "page", and thus
view more ads, is pretty insane.

If you aren't using infinite scrolling, chances are you're doing it wrong.

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tadfisher
Web comics, documentation, anything where clicking 'back' should get you to
the position you were browsing last without waiting for an ajax call, etc.
These all benefit from pagination.

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Qerub
Another plus with adding rel="next" and rel="prev" is that you can easily add
keyboard navigation to your pages with a script like this:
<http://vemod.net/rel-keyboard-navigation>

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getsat
will_paginate has been using these attributes for quite a while.

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jcoder
Great, this will just encourage pagination in online articles.

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josefresco
I don't think _this_ will make any dent in the use or expansion of pagination.
Pagination in order to increase ad impressions have already done the most
damage.

