Pagination can oftentimes be the cause of a number of SEO headaches, especially if not factored into a web build properly.
Common pagination issues (in relation to SEO) include, but are not limited to:
- Index bloat
- Content duplication
- Indexing issues (if paginated links aren’t renderable)
So getting it right, and understanding how search engines will interpret and process pagination can be important.
All search engines handle pagination differently, whether it’s how pagination is served, the use of rel directives, or even if it’s index status is controllable.
Does Yandex process rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags?
No.
The Yandex robot ignores the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes.
Can Yandex Confuse Paginated Pages As Duplicates?
Yes.
If the URL contains pagination either as a subfolder or through use of a parameter, and if the content contained is thin or very similar to other pages (think blogroll pages, blog category pages, etc – with the small content snippets and headers only), Yandex could confuse the pages as being duplicates and you’ll lose vital crawl paths to older content.
To avoid this, you can either:
- Canonical pages back to the root page (as Yandex supports the canonical tag)
- Add the Clean-param directive to the robots.txt file so that the robot ignores the parameters in the URL
