Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog

Posted: 07 May 2010 08:42 AM PDT

Today’s post is an answer to a question from Don:

How to best handle pagantion, use the same description meta tags? Use the same title tags just add page 2

First off, I’m going to answer this as user: avoid pagination if at all possible. Things like slide shows or lists where you show the 5, 10, 15 or even 100 items–just don’t dothem in multiple page format. It’s just awful for usability. Users want the info all on one page … really.

But back to the question at hand: how do you handle it from an SEO perspective? If you absolutely positively can’t get all the information onto one page and have to split it up, here’s how I would do it:

Reduce the article to as few pages as possible
Interconnect all the pages. You want the spiders to have the shortest crawling path with access to every page of article. If they have to crawl multiple levels, they simply won’t ever get all the way through.
I would put “Page 2″, “Page 3″ at the front of the title not the end. Chances are your title will be longer than usual and KWD’s at the end get less emphasis. They are more likely to be seen at the front and not counted as duplicate titles.
Give each page a unique meta description if you can’t leave it blank. In my opinion, a blank meta description is much better than a duplicate one.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How to Handle Pagination