Pagination with javascript for SEO, elegant or wrong?

One of the challenges facing enterprise-level SEO is the general specification for large sites.

By that I mean rules to make sure we’re not wasting links by needlessly diluting the authority they bring; or contradicting the content focus that made our site and its structure profoundly relevant from the start.

One that cropped up recently was pagination of articles, I’ll cover search result pagination in a later post.

Contradictory opinions on how best to paginate articles are common, specifically with SEO in mind.  As we know there are loads of different approaches to how content websites manage pagination, but different business units have vastly discint best-case scenarios, meaning it’s normally a case of compromise. Usually between commercial, editorial and digital marketing/SEO.

Is there a way to consistently paginate that keeps all parties happy?

The commercial best case

Sorry to be a cynic but this is obvious.  Loads of pages per article = loads of page views.  Ignoring user journey, this is commercially effective from both an ‘available display inventory’ point of view and a ‘look how engaged my site users are mr. advertiser’ point of view.  Simply, the commercial case for pagination is:

do it, and lots.

The editorial best case

I can already feel the shivers of some editors, and they’re shivering for good reason.  Forcing users to jump through numerous pages because that’s how we’ve decided to monetize their eyes is fundamentally, plain wrong. I have seen some really strong cases for severe pagination like on Time magazine’s photo essays but also some shameless overkill, I’m sure many would agree that the editorial journey can be just as powerful in pictures as in words, but needless pagination, particularly on cynical diggbait, is tiresome.

Issues affecting SEO

Ok, so onto the main beef.  A colleague and I had a great talk about the ramifications of pagination from an SEO point of view and both came to the conclusion that we face the following areas of risk:

• The anchor text
• To follow or not to follow?
• To index of not to index?
• Multiple URLs

The anchor text

Obvious and, if we decide to consistently paginate, purely a case of user understanding.  Stick with the masses here with absolute page number links and first/last links.  keyword rich pagination anchor text is completely off the menu if we want to avoid looking like a ridiculous spammer.

To follow or not to follow?

Assuming we do paginate, is there any reason to allow Google to leave the ‘main’ article page? On one hand yes, there’s alot of rich content on those supplemental article pages.  On the other, no. Where an article hits the SERPS early, we want to continue to rank a single page and herd new users to the ‘main’ article page.  Thus we’ll self-fulfill the traffic=links model.

In the increasingly unlikely event that people still link to additional article pages, will making sure we don’t rel=nofollow the link to page 1 on these additional pages mean that authority is channelled back?

To index of not to index?

It’s worth reiterating that noindex and nofollow are differet things entirely and need to be deployed strategically. But, continuing the thread in the previous paragraph, should these sub/article pages exist in search engines?

Again, by noindexing additional pages as well as nofollowing the links to them, we’re severly limiting the likeliehood that anyone will find a page two or three of our paginated article in the search engines. And technically, if we didn’t nofollow the first page link, chanelling that authority back to the single, indexable URL. So aren’t we minimizing the likeliehood of diluting inbound links?  Nope, not yet.

Multiple URLs

We can avoid duplicate titles and descriptions by controlling each page in the CMS but what’s the point?

The main issue here is inbound links diluting the inbound link authority across multiple URLs for the same article. Obviously we can manipulate which page users will see from a search results page by nofollowing and noindexing. But we can’t be certain that a properly chunked article won’t still have its separate pages linked to; and therefore the authority of the article still spread across multiple URLs.

SEO Best Case, Javascript?

I remember a time when javascript was the devil’s work.

Now though, javascript is commonly used as an effective and elegantly degrading method for cutting related content into separate ‘tabs’. Often seen in the travel sector, it’s a fantastic way to simplify the URLs that you’re expecting a search engine to crawl.

Why should we use it?  Well, mainly we want to maximise the value of inbound links, keeping all the content in one page of code and then use javascript to display the chosen content according to a user’s preference.  This method can be used so that the links to the content are anchors so even when javascript is disabled, the user simply uses the tab nav to skip down the page to the relevant content.  A great example of the elegance of this method is booking.com, try the different tabs, switch off javascript and have a nosy at the source.

So why don’t purely editorial sites use this method for pagination down the bottom of the article then?

Honestly, I have no idea. Particularly when a reload and therefore ad refresh can be called from the onclick. So we can maintain multiple ad views per article interaction, which is essentially what pagination is for commercially; we can provide pagination without multiple URLs; degrade gracefully to a single article for non-js visitors and present the same content at the same URL to both robots and real people.

I’m tempted to think of it as the pagination silver bullet but would love to hear other opinions.

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