Enterprise SEO is frequently about giving and taking – knowing what to fight for and where to give ground. Think about how this relates to pagination.
Annika in Stockholm asks:
“We have four sites with many destination pages listing a lot of hotels. Our UX department decided to show a list of 10 hotels and then a button that, when clicked, adds 10 more hotels to the list and so on. The URL stays the same but with different parameters.
How can I, from an SEO perspective, make sure that all hotel pages are indexed?
There are a lot of images in the list so it’s not an option to “view all” due to speed. Until now, we have used a solution with rel=next and rel=prev, but I’ve read that solution is no longer supported by Google.
Infinite scroll, as well as traditional pagination, is not an option either due to UX. So, what’s the best practice here?
I have struggled with this for many years and would really appreciate a solution for my dilemma.”
Annika, that’s a great question.
Because search engines no longer support rel=prev and rel=next, websites do not have to redesign their sites or remove those tags.
There’s no harm in leaving the tags up for anyone who’s curious. They will not harm you.
The heart of the issue, however, is how to handle pagination in a way that is both users and search engine-friendly.
As I consider this question, I’m left wondering why traditional pagination and infinite scroll aren’t options for UX. When it comes to user experience, neither of those are inherently bad.
Both can be done well in order to please the SEO, development, UX, and accessibility teams.
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A Simple Workaround
The use of sitemaps is the quickest, easiest, and cheapest – but not the best – way to improve this situation. To begin, make sure that all of your properties are listed in your XML sitemap.
This isn’t the best solution because there are no internal site links to the pages, but it will help engines crawl them while you work on other solutions.
You should also consider creating a sitemap for “all hotels.”
This page could be linked from your footer or HTML sitemap, and it could be a nice list organized by country/state, with country/state pages to help funnel search engines into a nice crawlable path to everything.
This is a workaround if you can’t do what I’m going to suggest below, but I said we’d start with the easy ones.
A Better Alternative
Before writing this article, I did a quick scan of major hotel brands and hotel search sites to see what they were up to.
In terms of UX, it’s all over the place, but most of them have some sort of quick fix, as previously mentioned, and also use a hybrid of infinite scroll, form interactions, and old-school pagination.
The approach I would recommend is to let your UX team keep the button (although buttons have a slew of other issues that are beyond the scope of this article), but also have them add some traditional pagination for you.
Users benefit from the fancy form/application feel, while search engines benefit from the crawlable links. Users will also receive links that they can share and send to others.
You can get really fancy with this and keep a URL in the link’s href=value while still using Javascript on click to maintain the application feel, and use something like pushState to change the URL without reloading the page.
For more information, see SEO-Friendly Pagination: A Complete Best Practices Guide.
Take and Give
Corporate SEO, or SEO for large sites, is all about knowing what to fight for and what to concede.
In Annika’s case, I would schedule a meeting with UX and the developers and layout the SEO requirements plainly.
“We need a crawlable path to all of the hotel pages that aren’t in the sitemaps,” tell them. “How can we do that within the constraints of this user experience?” and then see where the brainstorming takes you.
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