Google Removes Rel=prev/next and How It Changes SEO

1. Google Removes Rel=prev/next and How It Changes SEO Long Island SEO services keep themselves up-to-date with the latest Google algorithms and make changes to your web page accordingly. SEO plays a crucial role in online marketing for physicians. It is the best way to increase the quality of your website by making it user-friendly, faster and easier to navigate. It includes various techniques that make content visible and sends traffic to your website. Google is the most popular and most used search engine, therefore optimizing your website according to Google's algorithm is essential to improve your ranking and visibility. Google revises its algorithm very frequently and remaining up to date about its change is important for online marketing. In March, Google announced that they no longer support rel= prev/next mark up. Rel=prev/next was a markup that you could add to your web pages to communicate to Google that these pages are all part of a larger set of pages. So if you have content split into several parts, then byusing rel=prev/next mark up you can tell Google that those pages are all part of the same set. It was introduced in 2011. However, on March 21, 2019 Google stopped supporting this mark up. Although this was one of the techniques to optimize your website, later, Google included documentation on its webmasters Help Page that told all website owners to use the rel=prev/next markup. They instructed to use rel=”next” and rel=”prev” links or headers to show the relationship between component URLs. This markup suggests to Google

2. that you would like them to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus sending searchers to the first page. Removing the code from your site There is absolutely no need to remove the rel=prev/next markup from your site as it does nothing to your website. Moreover, other search engines like Bing still use rel=prev/next markup to find pages and understand site structure. So, in short you need not go back and update all your old pages that have been using the markup since 2011. How does it change SEO? The removal of rel=prev/next was not noticed by any SEO professional until someone saw that the Big G had pulled the documentation page that people started asking questions. Deleting rel=prev/next means that now Google will index the category page instead of pagination. According to Google Web Performance Engineer Ilya Grigorik, Googlebot is an intelligent feature that lets you find your next pages with a clean signal. This is because the bot can evaluate all the links on your site and if you have optimized it well then Google will find your related content and rank it. Tips to optimize ▪The first step is to ensure that all your content are on the first page in the category. This will help you with indexing for the right search term and once the people get to see your category, then you can find other pages. ▪Optimize your featured image on your main category. Make sure that you have a thumbnail that is optimized with a keyword in the file name and alt text and this will give Google additional info about the nature of your pages. ▪The next step is to add as many items as possible to your category page without slowing it down much. Try to break down your items into sub categories and then include one representative from each subcategory on the category page. Google now recommends to put all your content on a single page and not break them into many different pages for the same piece of content. So website owners should be careful about this new change. Providers of Long Island SEO services have professionals who keep themselves up-to-date about the latest Google algorithm and make changes to your web page accordingly, and this helps you improve your ranking. 800-670-2809