Pagination Indignation

OK, indignation might be taking it a little too far, but pagination is annoying.

What’s Wrong With Pagination?

• What’s the point? Does anyone say “I really want to go to page 68 of the blog?” No – they use the search.
• Weak link text. From an SEO standpoint, does the link text “68” help Google understand what a page is about?
• Impossible to optimize. Take page 68 as an example. You can optimize that page, but when you’ve published a few more posts all the content will move to page 69 and your work has been wasted. Most pages like this simply end up with a page title such as “Alledia Blog – Page 68”
• Duplicate title tags: Check out this guy who has 1400 pages all with identical metadata, simply because of pagination.

Let’s take an example of how to it and how not to use pagination:

Bad: The 2007 SEOmoz.org

This is an extreme example with pages all the way from 1 to 107. The links are nofollowed, but in terms of usability this pagination is a bust:

Good: The 2009 SEOmoz.org

This is much more user friendly. The most likely use of pagination is for people to find recent blog posts so there’s a simple “Next” link. Again, all the links are nofollowed:

A Useful Joomla Mambot

If you’re already using on your individual articles, here’s a great little Joomla 1.5 plugin to help you out: TitleNav. It will replace the with the title of the next article. It’s the kind of plugin that helps your site’s SEO, usability and accessibility.