If you’ve dealt with any web development company or online marketing firm, you’ve probably heard the phrase: content is king, at least once or twice.  While new, quality and engaging content will get you excellent rankings on major search engines, you’ll find that many problems occur when you have too much content.  Pagination is the process of dealing with large volumes of content.  Here are some informal tips on how to deal with it properly.

Pagination is easier explained with images rather than nuanced text.  Take a look at the image below:

You’ve seen this especially on eCommerce websites where people aren’t sure what to do with large numbers of products that are shown on their website.  They usually have links at the bottom or top of the page which label which page you’re on, and then list the rest of the pages you can access.  This might not seem like an issue, but you’re faced with these problems:

1.     Duplicate Content.

2.    Poor User Navigation.

Duplicate content comes into play because each of these numbered pages will have the same content (minus the products which might be different) and major search engines like Google might ignore some of the pages when it crawls your website for indexing within its search engine.  Pages might be excluded because they are being seen as duplicate content.

Poor user navigation might turn off potential customers from going through the vast amounts of content on your website.  Another bad example of poor user navigation related to pagination is having “next” and “previous” buttons as the only means to go through old content.  It forces a user to go through all of the pages before finding the one thing they want.  Time is money and the longer it takes a user to find what they want, the more likely they are to just leave.

Below is a good example of proper, SEO friendly, pagination:

Notice that it tells you what page your own, how many pages there are, and how clear it is to simply navigate to old content on other pages.  The next button lets you navigation through pages linearly or you can choose where to go on your own.  If adding a logical pagination bar is out of the question, adding a sitemap is a great way to tell spiders about the content on your archived pages and avoid duplicate content issues.