rel next rel prev is a markup that you can add to the HTML of your website. You use the markup to tell search engines that this is the next page and this is the previous page in a set of pagination. When we say pagination, we mean when content is connected by multiple pages (page 1, page 2, page 3, etc) on a website. You will often see pagination on category pages of website that hold products or articles.
There is another piece of markup known as rel canonical. This is a piece of code you can also add to the HTML of your website. When you add this piece of code, it tells Google that no matter what URL you are on, to rank the page based on the URL listen in the rel canonical. It basically tells Google, this is the URL you should rank no matter what URL you are crawling.
A rel canonical looks like this
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2″/>
A rel next rel prev looks like this
<link rel=”prev” href=”https://www.example.com/article-part1.html”>
<link rel=”next” href=”https://www.example.com/article-part3.html”>
Can you add Rel Next Rel Prev and Rel Canonical to the Same Page
When considering if you can add rel next rel prev and rel canonical to the same page, it can seem a little contradictory. However, Google states that you can add rel next rel prev and rel canonical to the same page. According to Google, ”
rel="next"andrel="prev"are orthogonal concepts torel="canonical". You can include both declarations. For example, https://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain:<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2"/> <link rel="prev" href="https://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1&sessionid=123" /> <link rel="next" href="https://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3&sessionid=123" />
It is good to know that you can add rel canonical to the same page as rel next rel prev. Now if you see both of these markups in the HTML you will know that it is OK.
Sources
- Indicate paginated content, Google. 2014
