Google now support meta tags to indicate next and previous pages for a single article

Google has announced support for some new meta tags that can be used to indicate different pages of the same article.

The basic idea is to help the crawlers better understand pagination on your website or blog.

The newly support meta tags are:

rel=“next”

rel=“prev”

The first page of the article can feature the next tag. the middle pages would feature both the tags and the last page would include the prev tag.

Google spoke about these new tags:

rel=“next” and rel=“prev” values can be either relative or absolute URLs (as allowed by the < link > tag). And, if you include a < base > link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.

rel=“next” and rel=“prev” only need to be declared within the < head > section, not within the document < body >.

We allow rel=“previous” as a syntactic variant of rel=“prev” links.

rel=”next” and rel=”previous” on the one hand and rel=”canonical” on the other constitute independent concepts. Both declarations can be included in the same page.

rel=“prev” and rel=“next” act as hints to Google, not absolute directives.

When implemented incorrectly, such as omitting an expected rel=”prev” or rel=”next” designation in the series, we’ll continue to index the page(s), and rely on our own heuristics to understand your content.