Google launches the recommendation not to use paginations rel= prev / next in paginations, it is officially obsolete, we tell you how pagination works in Prestashop and how to solve this update
The news broke early today, March 21, on the Google Webmaster Twitter account, with the recommendation not to use rel= prev / next paginations, then they removed all the documentation on this subject until now.
The reason that Google has given is that it thinks that users seek to have all the information on a single page, they do not like information on more than 1 page. Obviously, it’s a recommendation, but…
It smells like spring!! Send eggs!! They paginate!!
Google sets the pace, and the rest of us have no choice but to follow it if we want to rank at the top of search engines. Google seems that this year is going to give a lot of war in this regard.
Google deprecates pagination next prev
Technical SEO is a constant from day to day, behind are the small updates, practically we have updates of new features to be implemented in stores every month, AMP, PWA, Responsive, search intent, etc. having a development team or a maintenance service for Prestashop is essential.
In our case I think it affects 90% of the stores we manage, they are all using classic pagination, that is, for individual pages, then the execution can be better or worse but in the end, most stores with Prestashop are developed like this, it comes in the default theme and comes in most templates.
How does pagination work in Prestashop?
I am going to explain to you how pagination works in Prestashop, at least until now, because I think that until Prestashop decides to update the default template we are going to have many versions ahead, so it is important to know what we have wrong and What should we change, or how should we solve it?
- Classic pagination: Normally most Prestashop stores worked with the typical pages with x products per page and from preferences, you selected the number of products you want per page. But it was wrong because Google marked them as duplicate content since they were all the same.
- Improved pagination: The previous method could be improved, since 2011 it recommended using the rel= prev / next tags to indicate the previous or next page, we could also mark with our canonical module which was the main page, in this way we could transmit authority to the rest of the products and we avoided duplicate content for each one of the pages.
In this sense, Prestashop did it wrong, it has always done it wrong, it required additional programming to leave it as Google asked us.
Using rel=” next” and rel=” prev” – Deprecated method
According to Google, this is how you should manage these types of tags:
You can use HTML links or HTTP headers to indicate the previous or next segment of a long article divided into multiple pages.
- Decide whether to use HTTP headers or HTML tags
<link>. - The first page should only include a “next” link that leads to the next part of the article.
- The last page should only include a “prev” link that leads to the previous part of the article.
- All intermediate pages should have “next” and “prev” links to point to the parts of the article that immediately follow and precede them.
How to fix the removal of rel= next prev in Prestashop paginations?
The million dollar question, how do we solve this problem, because there is only one solution, loading all the products on a single page .
This presents several problems, if we have few products nothing happens, but if we have more than 1000 products per category, if Google asks us for loading speed, it is a positioning factor, and also remove the pagination, today, only it occurs to us to solve it with an infinite scroll and with the canonical.
To use the infinite pagination in Prestashop you have two options, either use a module for this purpose, or make a custom programming, it will depend on the customizations you have, filter modules, and other options that we can have on these pages, since, as always happens in these issues, there will be some problem.
In the official Addons of Prestashop you have some modules to do the infinite scroll and to be able to remove the pagination:
