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Google On Pagination & Showing Newer Content First

Published

2 years ago

February 22, 2022

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.

Related Topics:Content Google Newer Pagination Showing

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Google Won’t Change The 301 Signals For Ranking & SEO

Published

6 hours ago

April 24, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at the SERP conference last week that there is no way that Google would change how the 301 redirect signal works for SEO or search rankings. Gary added that it’s a very reliable signal.

Nikola Minkov quoted Gary Illyes as saying, “It is a very reliable signal, and there is no way we could change that signal,” when asked if a 301 redirect not working is a myth. Honestly, I am not sure the context of this question, as it is not clear from the post on X, but here it is:

More from @methode:
– 301 redirect not working is a myth. “It is a very reliable signal, and there is no way we could change that signal”.#SERPConf2024 #SERPConf2024International
— Nikola Minkov (@n_minkov) April 19, 2024

We’ve covered 301 redirects here countless times – but I never saw a myth that Google does not use 301 redirects as a signal for canonicalization or for passing signals from an old URL to the redirected URL.

Forum discussion at X.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.

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Google Again Says Ignore Link Spam Especially To 404 Pages

Published

1 day ago

April 23, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing to pages that 404/410 are links that do not count – but John Mueller from Google said it again.

In a thread on X, John Mueller from Google wrote, “if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped.” “They do nothing,” he added, “If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link.”

John then added, “I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.”

Asking if it would hurt to disavow, after responding with the messages above, John wrote:

It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).

Earlier this year we had tons of SEOs notice spammy links to 404 error pages, John said ignore them. In 2021, Google said links to 404 pages do not count, Google also said that in 2012 and many other times.

Plus, outside of links to 404 pages, Google has said to ignore spammy links, time and time again – even the toxic links – ignore them. The messaging around this changed in 2016 when Penguin 4.0 was released and Google began devaluing links over demoting them.

Here are those new posts in context:

I’d say add both. Lol
— Jeremy Rivera (@JeremyRiveraSEO) April 11, 2024

Sure. But also, save yourself the work completely :-).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024

Re-reading your initial post – if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped. They do nothing. If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link. I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024

… but still… is this a dumb idea?
— Rebekah Edwards (@rebekah_creates) April 11, 2024
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It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024

And in general, Google says it ignores spammy links, so you should too (not new) but this post from John Mueller is:

I would just ignore them, Google ignores them too. Sometimes they’re just more visible in tools, but that doesn’t mean they’re a problem.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 18, 2024

And then also on Mastodon wrote about a similar situation, “Google has 2 decades of practice of ignoring spammy links. There’s no need to do anything for those links.”

Forum discussion at X.

Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.

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Google Needs Very Few Links To Rank Pages; Links Are Less Important

Published

2 days ago

April 22, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search “needs very few links to rank pages.”

Gary reportedly said, “We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.”

I am quoting Patrick Stox who is quoting what he heard Gary say on stage at the event. Here is Patrick’s post where Gary did a rare reply:

I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024

Gary said this a year ago, also in 2022 and other times as well. We previously covered that Google said links would likely become even less important in the future. And even Matt Cutts, the former Googler, said something similar about eight years ago and the truth is, links are weighted a lot less than it was eight years ago and that trend continues. A couple of years ago, Google said links are not the most important Google search ranking factor.

Of course, many SEOs think Google lies about this.

Judith Lewis interviewed Gary Illyes at the SERP Conf this past Friday.

Forum discussion at X and image credit to @n_minkov.