Last month, Google announced that it no longer considers the rel “prev” and “next” tags for page pagination. It's time to do an article on this announcement to clarify some points that may still be unclear. Google Webmasters Blog Pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev" Attributes Article Article on Pagination with the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes from the Google Webmasters Blog What are these rel attributes "prev" and "next" for? Since 2011, Google has been using these attributes to help with the pagination of URL addresses or different pages , between them, of a website.
They were mainly used by Google and its algorithms to better crawl the pages of paginated content , but also to better identify them and thus index them , at best, in the fax list search engine. They were also used to provide canonical addresses for a set of pages. It was recommended to set up this system in order to indicate to Google that certain pages could be similar to a set of pages. Why Google will no longer take tags into account? Over the years, the Googlebot has become smart enough to find the next page in a site just by looking at the links on a page. It is for this reason that the “prev” and “next” rel tags are no longer taken into account.
Google no longer needs the explicit “prev” and “next” signals, as Ilya Grigorik, web performance engineer at Google, clarified on his Twitter account, as you can see in the tweet below. Tweet from a Google engineer on explicit "prev" and "next" signals “no, use paging. let me put it in context. Googlebot is smart enough to find your next page by looking at the links on the page.