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This Is How Excessive Pagination Affects Your Website Traffic

PaginationPagination is the helpful and usual strategy that most SEO experts and webmasters use to order category web pages that include links to content or product pages. Pagination is a great thing. However, in some cases, it can cause an overly deep category archive which could impact indexing and rating.

Pagination

In this context, pagination pertains to linking a topic category archive to another one in a sequence, typically sorted by date. So for example, you have 100 articles and each category includes summaries and links to 20 articles. To contain every one of them, it will take five category archive pages. The pagination contains five pages.

What is Excessive Pagination?

In the context of web publishing, pagination refers to the page number that accumulate in an archive of web pages. It occurs once you have so many merchandise in a category or pages in a category archive of articles that the Content Management System (CMS) or shopping cart software create a sequence of pages to contain all of them.

Most of the time, this isn’t an issue. It becomes a problem when a site visitor must click scores and a large number of links to what they may see as seemingly limitless number of category pages. It may not be the best way to archive web pages.

The Impact Of Pagination To Ranking

It gets hard to reach a product page or an individual article when there are too many category pages to click through to end up where it is.

Websites become increasingly distant from the home page and essentially buried as articles are added to the category every now and then.

Of course, this dampening effect can be counteracted with direct links to the page. A page that accumulates direct links is regarded as authoritative.

The issue of excessive pagination can last for months or even years (depending on the content production). The unwanted effects may not be noticed until the site traffic eventually drops.

An article will be buried within the category archive as more time passes by. Neglecting to deal with excess pagination can cause a decreased search traffic.

Flat Site Architecture

A method used by many to take care of this matter is to produce a flat site architecture. A flat site architecture is about making a lot of links from the homepage to the second and third level web pages that every page in the site is 1-3 clicks from the homepage.

The only problem with that strategy is that it’s impossible to theme a website into various categorise to make website sections have a meaningful interlinking between pages.

For instance, on a personal injury website, a site about Car Injury Attorney may have lots of links to other pages regarding totally different subjects like fall and slip injuries.

Outbound links can deliver what that page linking out is about. Preferably, a page regarding Car Injury Attorney will have outbound links connected to that topic that emphasise that instead of making the topic of a web webpage vague.

Most of the time, a flat site architecture is not advisable. It is also not widely considered to be the best exercise. Flat site architecture is a fringe process.

How Site Structure Becomes Corrupted

What usually happens is an SEO professional or webmaster begins with a basic pair of categories. Afterwards, they publish within those categories.

As time passes by, the number of pages within every category becomes challenging to get around.

That’s when the pagination site structure come into play.

This results in categories made up of dozens or hundreds of category archive pages. That’s a pagination style of site structure.

That style form of site architecture compels the user to click through pages about a category but not directly about the subtopic of their preferred category.

For instance, a lifestyle website feature a travel section. At some point, the publisher must go over a list of all the content and answer these questions:

  • Which article topics do site visitors love the most?
  • Which article topics have the most article committed to them?

Then, take those topics and split them into their individual subcategories. This way, users (as well as Google) can easily reach the posts they are searching for.

In a way, this can also assist search engine listings in understanding what an article is about when it comes to what is the topic of the article.

Remember that signalling that an article is about Travel, and signalling that the article is about Travel to Austin, Texas is not the same.

By splitting a category into subtopics, a publisher can show a lot more content and help Google have a better idea of what the article is about.

This solution may not be applicable to everyone, and no solution would ever be. Still, it’s great to be familiar with it and be able deploy it on it ideal time.

What John Mueller Has To Say About Site Architecture

One person recently sent a question on Twitter to John Mueller, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst:

“Dare I ask this but tips on handling pagination for a blog (not e-commerce, so no product pages) with over 1,000 pages? Let’s just say it’s been around for 8 years and SEO wasn’t a major factor for most of that”.

John Mueller replied:

“Use categories or tags to cross link so that you have a handful paginated pages per type, from where you link to the blog posts. Keep a good & balanced hierarchy, not too flat, not too deep”.

During a Webmaster Hangout, Mueller said this about site architecture:

“…we’ll see the home page is really important, things linked from the home page are generally pretty important as well.

And then… as it moves away from the home page we’ll think probably this is less critical”.

That pages linked directly from the home page are important is fairly well known but it’s worth repeating.  In a well organized website the major category pages and any other important pages are going to be linked from the home page”.

Takeaway

If website traffic and ranking is slowly dropping, consider adding the pagination problem to the checklist of things to check.

Why You Should Not Use FAQ Structure Data Markup Repetitively

Google has new guidelines for using FAQ structured data with suggestions concerning repetitive content.

The following line has been included to Google’s developer document for FAQ structured data:

“If you have FAQ content that is repetitive on your site (meaning, the same question and answer appear on multiple pages on your site), mark up only one instance of that FAQ for your entire site”.

This update was found by Kenichi Suzuki, who discussed the details on Twitter.

Presumably, Google added the new line about marking up repetitive content to stop sites from hogging up way too many spots in the search engine results pages.

Suzuki posted examples of suspicious utilisation of FAQ structured data by Expedia:

Kenichi Suzuki

Here, it is evident how the same questions regarding Tokyo are marked up on different pages. Utilising FAQ structured data this way is against Google’s new guidelines.

Rather, those questions regarding Tokyo should just be marked up once, preferably on a page committed to queries about Tokyo.

If the same question should be included on multiple pages, site owners should avoid marking it up whenever it appears.

Recurring violations of Google’s FAQ structured data guidelines may lead to a site losing its eligibility to appear in featured snippets.

Details of this post came from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pagination-seo/352386/ and https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-discourages-repetitive-use-of-faq-structured-data-markup/352430/.

Every SEO company has its own strategies in boosting your website rankings and performance, and it’s your job to find the best one today. See how we can help you with this by visiting Position1SEO.

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Author: Jason Ferry
Jason Ferry is an SEO specialist based in the United Kingdom. Taking pride in his many years of experience in the search engine optimisation industry, he has honed his skills in various digital marketing processes. From keyword marketing, website auditing, and link building campaigns, to social media monitoring, he is well-versed in all of them. Jason Ferry’s excellent skills in SEO, combined with his vast experience, makes him one of the best professionals to work with in the industry today. Not only does he guarantee outstanding output for everyone he works with, but also values a deep relationship with them as well.

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