Page-Links Plus and WordPress Pagination Best Practices

There’s a good deal of competing information regarding the effect paginating WordPress content has on SEO. Here’s a list of some of the highest-profile resources:

• Avoid the Pains of Pagination (UX Movement)
• Pagination 101 (Faruk Ateş)
• Pagination Best Practices (Faruk Ateş)
• Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices (Smashing Magazine)
• Pagination and SEO: Red Flags and Best Practices (Ada Ivanoff)

Some articles claim that paginating long pages and posts helps SEO while others suggest it’s better to include all content on a single page. They all agree, however, on two points: content creators must (a) provide a canonical URL for any paginated content and (b) help search bots crawl all page/post content at once.

Natively, WordPress supports canonical URL’s, but it doesn’t do as much to help content creators serve the complete contents of paginated pages and posts to search bots or human readers. Page-Links Plus can help. It’s a WordPress pagination plugin that helps users paginate content easily, efficiently, and according to SEO best practices.

The free version of Page-Links Plus helps human readers and bots access the complete content of paginated pages and posts by adding a “single page” option to WordPress page lists.

The premium version of Page-Links Plus takes this a step further.

Its “Pagination Controls” module offers two Ajax options that help bots and mobile users access the full content of paginated pages and posts while also improving overall visitor experience, helping mobile users quickly scroll through paginated content, and minimizing server load.

Because users sometimes share paginated URL’s – and thereby push inbound traffic to the middle, rather than the first page, of an article – Page-Links Plus’ Ajax options also help content creators avoid social media challenges associated with paginated content.

Page-Links Plus helps solve a number of other important challenges as well.
First, it can be difficult for WordPress non-developers and lay users to style page lists and manage wp_link_pages(); parameters. Page-Links Plus’ Pagination Controls module helps site admins manage associated parameters and integrate and manage HTML elements and CSS classes and id’s with WordPress’ intuitive administration framework.

Second, managing WordPress pagination with inline <!–nextpage–> tags is tedious, inexact, and time-consuming. The Page-Links Plus Auto Pagination module is a site-wide management tool that allows you to paginate pages and posts quickly and uniformly without splitting sentences or words or creating widows, orphans, or trailing headers.

Third, lengthy pages and posts may create unwieldy, wider-than-preferred page lists. For posts and pages with high word counts, the Page-Links Plus Scrolling Pagination module helps WordPress users integrate custom-length, scrolling page lists.

So whether you’re a WordPress developer, site manager, or lay user, Page-Links plus can help you set up, customize, and manage your site’s pagination quickly and easily and according to SEO best practices.

Next Steps

• Learn more about Page-Links Plus @pagelinksplus.com
• Explore the Page-Links Plus demo
• Review Page-Links Plus’ features in :02