Pagination Indignation

Written by Steve Burge

Joomla Pagination OK, indignation might be taking it a little too far, but pagination is annoying.

What's Wrong With Pagination?

What's the point? Does anyone say "I really want to go to page 68 of the blog?" No - they use the search.
Weak link text. From an SEO standpoint, does the link text "68" help Google understand what a page is about?
Impossible to optimize. Take page 68 as an example. You can optimize that page, but when you've published a few more posts all the content will move to page 69 and your work has been wasted. Most pages like this simply end up with a page title such as "Alledia Blog - Page 68"
Duplicate title tags: Check out this guy who has 1400 pages all with identical metadata, simply because of pagination.

Let's take an example of how to it and how not to use pagination:

Bad: The 2007 SEOmoz.org

This is an extreme example with pages all the way from 1 to 107. The links are nofollowed, but in terms of usability this pagination is a bust:

seomoz-bad

Good: The 2009 SEOmoz.org

This is much more user friendly. The most likely use of pagination is for people to find recent blog posts so there's a simple "Next" link. Again, all the links are nofollowed:

seomoz-good

A Useful Joomla Mambot

If you're already using on your individual articles, here's a great little Joomla 1.5 plugin to help you out: TitleNav. It will replace the with the title of the next article. It's the kind of plugin that helps your site's SEO, usability and accessibility.

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Your Comments (7)

Charles Duane

January 09, 2009

Saw this on Twitter moments ago. Thanks. Charlie

Yannick Gaultier

January 09, 2009

Hi Steve,
I have always thought we should go the other way around and add more recent articles on pages with increasing numbers. So that an article first published on page 1 stays on page one. The current "front page" will have a variable page number, but that does not matter really.
How counter-intuitive would that be ?

Tom Thorns

January 09, 2009

I've often wondered about the best way to change the pagination of joomla sites - the new seomoz way looks great. I've done a little digging and reading of the view code in j1.5 and it doesn't look that easy to change as the current code is served up via a core pagination helper (I think).

Would the best (and easiest) solution be to create a sh404sef meta plugin modification for the com_content/com_frontpage components that makes the /page-2 etc pages robots meta "noindex, follow"? That way the content gets spidered and found but the individual pages don't get/waste PR.

Any thoughts?

Yannick Gaultier

January 09, 2009

Except for those pages which son't have a Read more link, and resides entirely on the "frontpage" ....

Stephen Moseley

January 09, 2009

Steve - I agree. Pagination seems to give little value any way you slice it.

Yannick, Your idea actually makes a lot of sense, but I think it is one of those things that people expect the first page of posts to be the front page of the blog. It actually makes more sense to have the first page of posts be the oldest post.

On a really active blog I might have to go back a few pages if I miss something, but anything past 4-5 pages back is useless to me. Too much wasted time - like you said - its easier to search.

Are there alternatives to Pagination that would be more user friendly? I can't think of too many other than something like Tags which we've talked about before.

Yannick Gaultier

January 12, 2009

Hi Stephen

I think it is one of those things that people expect the first page of posts to be the front page of the blog. It actually makes more sense to have the first page of posts be the oldest post.

Just to be sure we understand each other, I did not suggest that the newest posts would not be on the "front" page,and that you would need to browse to page 10, 20 or more to find latest. I suggest only the numbering would change. Say you have 105 posts. Your blog 'front' page would show the most recent posts, #101 to 105. The "next" button would lead you to page 9, showing posts #91 to 100. On page 9, you'd have prev link going to "front" page and next link going to page 8. Page 8 would show posts #81 to 90. This would repeat until you reach page 1, which would always have posts #1 to 10
The only problem with this is actually the "front"page, which would have a varying content as new posts would stay on front page for a while, then move to a numbered page after they have been pushed out of front page by more recent pages. However, after jumping to a numbered page, they would stay there and never change url again. A solution to that would probably be to put the new posts on a numbered page from the start, and organize a 302 redirect between the front-page and the current "highest" numbered page (like www.mysite.com/blog being 302 redirected automatically to www.mysite.com/blog/page-9 for instance)
An alternative, instead of redirecting, would be to add a "permalink" on the blog entry. Actually, the clickable title or Read more link would already serve that purpose. Only those blog entries without a Read more link would need a permalink.
Is it worth the trouble ? can this be superimposed to Joomla native pagination ?

Steve Burge

January 12, 2009

Hi Yannick

"How counter-intuitive would that be?" Probably very :) It would be more like a magazine than a blog ... Page 1 = Edition 1 etc. An interesting idea, but I'm not sure it is worth the trouble.

I think the long-term storage solutions for old blog posts are already implemented in Joomla:

1) In category lists
2) Accessible via the search box. If people want to search by age, a good search function can allow people to search in particular time frams.