Google On Pagination & Showing Newer Content First

In this next question, Google’s John Mueller was asked about the downside of having newer content published at the end of your pagination set. In short, Google might not value that much the newer content when it is found deeper in your pagination set, but please keep reading.

John explained that if you have the same content on page one and two of your pagination set, then Google might not crawl the pagination set as often because it does not see the newer content. But if you place the newer content on the first page of the pagination set, Google might discover that content sooner because it is not as deep into the pagination set.

But it depends, you want to make sure to do what is best for the user and sometimes that means showing the older content first, sometimes (if possible) the best content first and sometimes the newest content first.

This can obviously be applied to pagination sets for e-commerce category pages, news sites, or anything with pagination. Since rel prev / next is not supported – Google has been all about you just leaving the pages as is. Google has a help document on it with advice.

In any event, watch the video, it starts at 19:34 mark and goes on for a bit, here is the first part of the transcript:

Question: My question my main one is centered around the idea of paginated content. So if I have a say a long discussion thread with you know maybe 100 or more comments, it’s probably intuitive to split it over multiple pages so the length of the initial page isn’t too long for people to scroll. So the question is let’s say a new comment is posted towards the end of the discussion thread, it gets added on to the end which could appear say on page 4 or page 5 or beyond because it’s the newest comment. And then across all pages of the discussion thread, you know, the date it was updated will reflect the most recent activity. However the most recent activity does not appear until page 4 or page 5, for example. I’m just trying to get an idea of the best way or whether Google understands to to crawl in through each page or whether the most recent comment needs to be featured more prominently, any recommendation along those lines?

Answer: I think that’s ultimately up to you.So that’s something where I would try to think about like which of these comments you want to prioritize. I assume if something is on page four, then we would have to crawl like page one two three first to find that. And usually that would mean that it’s kind of like a longer away from the main part of the website. And from our point of view what would probably happen there is we would not give it that much weight and we would probably not recrawl that page as often. So that’s something where if you’re saying well if it’s on page four then it’s probably not that critical then that that would be kind of how we would see it as well. Whereas if you say the newest comment should be the most visible ones then maybe it makes sense to kind of reverse that order and show that show them differently. Because if they’re the newest comments are right on the main page then it’s a lot easier for us to recrawl that more often and to give it a little bit more weight in the search results.

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.