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Home / Search Engine Optimization / SEO Pagination, Rel Next Rel Prev Base Link for Relative URLs

SEO Pagination, Rel Next Rel Prev Base Link for Relative URLs

January 25, 2016 By John E Lincoln

In search engine optimization, category optimization and pagination can get complicated. There are just a lot of options. You can rel canonical all your pagination to one main page, you can no index all the paginated pages and follow the links, you can do nothing and hope Google gets it right, you can create view all pages, you can make custom templates, you can enable a facet pagination that does not change the URLs or you can do rel next rel prev.

The method you choose depends on the quality of the content and your site structure philosophies. I am not going to get into all of the subtleties now (but you can read about them here if you like). But what I am going to do, is discuss a very small and important part of the rel next rel prev optimization for SEO that a lot of people miss.

Rel Next Rel Prev Base Link for Relative URLs SEO

Our team (credit to Amanda) came across a technical error with rel next rel prev this week on a website that is worth sharing. A website had relative URLs in their rel next rel prev optimization, but the URLs were serving 404 errors. But why?

Basically, it is important to note that if you use relative links for rel next rel prev, you need to make sure you get your <base>  URL right. The <base> URL is very important for rel next rel prev pagination.

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

This is a very important point to keep in mind if you are using relative links in your rel net rel prev. What this means is, if the URL of your page is:

https://ignitevisibility.com/services/seo/3

And if you have <base> link in your document such as

<base href=”https://ignitevisibility.com/services/seo/3″>

And your relative links in your rel next rel prev pagination are:

<link rel=”prev” href=”/services/seo/2″ />
<link rel=”next” href=”/services/seo/4″ />

Google will actually see those URLs in the rel next rel prev as being

<link rel=”prev” href=”https://ignitevisibility.com/services/seo/3/services/seo/2” />
<link rel=”next” href=”https://ignitevisibility.com/services/seo/3/services/seo/4” />

As you can see, this is a technical error that could causes major issues with your pagination (lots of 404 errors in the URLs). Instead, you need to make sure your <base> link matches up with your relative URLs. So if you were going to have a base, it should look like this.

<base href=”https://ignitevisibility.com”>

And your relative links in your rel next rel prev pagination should be:

<link rel=”prev” href=”/services/seo/2″ />
<link rel=”next” href=”/services/seo/4″ />

This will result in Google seeing the correct pagination.

Google will see those URLs as being

<link rel=”prev” href=”https://ignitevisibility.com/services/seo/2″ />
<link rel=”next” href=”https://ignitevisibility.com/services/seo/4″ />

Make sure to keep this in mind next time you are using relative URLs for rel next rel prev.

About John E Lincoln

John Lincoln (MBA) is CEO of Ignite Visibility (a 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 Inc. 5000 company) a highly sought-after digital marketing strategist, industry speaker and author of two books, "The Forecaster Method" and "Digital Influencer." Over the course of his career, Lincoln has worked with over 1,000 online businesses ranging from small startups to amazing clients such as Office Depot, Tony Robbins, Morgan Stanley, Fox, USA Today, COX and The Knot World Wide. John Lincoln is the editor of the Ignite Visibility blog. While he is a contributor, he does not write all of the articles and in many cases he is supported to ensure timely content.

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About The Editor

John E Lincoln, CEO

John Lincoln is CEO of Ignite Visibility, one of the top digital marketing agencies in the nation and a 6x Inc. 5,000 company. Lincoln is consistently named one of the top marketing experts in the industry. He has been recipient of the Search Engine Land "Search Marketer of the Year" award, named the #1 SEO consultant in the USA by Clutch.co, most admired CEO and 40 under 40. Lincoln has written two books (The Forecaster Method and Digital Influencer) and made two movies (SEO: The Movie and Social Media Marketing: The Movie) on digital marketing. He is a digital marketing strategy adviser to some of the biggest names in business. John Lincoln is the editor of the Ignite Visibility blog. While he is a major contributor, he does not write all of the articles.

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