Pagination, a brief history of blogging & SEO

Pagination Pagination is a necessary evil! It’s a bit of a throwback to a day before pages load in extra content dynamically as you scroll. It allows users the ability to trawl back through time to read additional content in a chronological way. Chronological ordering is of no use to search engines however, and pagination is actually useful only to indexation, not categorisation. If a site/blog only used pagination to navigate archive content all the old articles/posts would be dropped, and sooner rather than later. The rise of blogging’s popularity and it’s usefulness has an interesting history. There are 2 main factors at play here and they’re both related to SEO: 1) Google started to crack down on the more underhand methods that some SEO’s used to use of adding links into the footer and/or the side bar of websites. In various algorithm updates it decided to give less priority to these parts of all web page. Instead, focussing on the main navigation and the main page content, Google cleaned up the SERPs for a while. 2) Another part of the algorithm became more prominent and understood by the SEO community – that of freshness (or more specifically QDF: Query Deserves Freshness). How do you keep adding fresh content to a website to keep the search engines coming back for more? Why through adding a blog of course. A brief history of blogging This left the SEO’s no choice but to come up with ways of getting links into the body copy of the web page – hence the rise of guest blogging. Links from other sites to yours from relevant content & context still hold a lot of clout. As a result, to some extent, blogs have become a bucket for content generated purely for the purpose of SEO. But there are of course good examples, and those writing great content are starting to win the war of attention – a much better metric to measure than most other SEO metrics (more on attention metrics here). …and SEO! There are also of course better ways to construct your blog that benefit SEO, and these are also, thankfully, primarily for users too: a) We’ve mentioned external contextual linking, and it’s equally important when linking through to content on your own site. Where it makes sense to do so always link through to other articles that you have written on your own...