How to avoid pagination on a website to have a flat architecture?

Question

I read the book "The Art of SEO", a very good book about SEO, in my opinion. In the sixth chapter of this book, the authors argue the importance of flat architecture for a website in terms of SEO, and they recommend that webmasters avoid pagination, as this facilitates a deep architecture and allows some content to be inaccessible, if only with a high number of clicks. The authors missed the opportunity to give one or more tips to solve the problem they raised.

So my question is: what, in your opinion, is the solution to avoid pagination?

Answer 1

The key does not avoid pagination, but does not rely on pagination. When you rely on it to display large lists of content, you apply this "many click" navigation. You want the user (and therefore robots) to have simpler and more intuitive ways to access your content.

Usually, when you look at pagination, you are at point IA, which is not easily broken into a hierarchical structure. At this point, the best approach to get a lot of content is through filtering using tags.

Take SO as a good example that essentially has no IA behind a large gigantic list of questions. On the main page of questions now there are 142414 pages. If this were the only way to find relevant content, it would be NIGHT. But a good tag system suddenly makes it easier to use. For the sake of simplicity, pretend that paginator has only prev and next, and there is only one sort order, in fact, these functions help improve the depth of questions in a similar way, giving shortcuts through the list, but not where near as much as tags.

As soon as you click on a tag, you will get links that add related tags. You can narrow your questions very quickly. Think about going to a question somewhere in the middle, did I choose RSA blind signature using the .NET cryptographic API? which was on page 70,000.

It takes 70,000 clicks to get normally, this is obviously very poor SEO. On the Tags page (1 click) “Encryption” on page 6 (6 clicks) add in “Cryptography” (7 clicks) add “rsa” (8 clicks) and in “.net” (9 clicks), and the question appears on the page . Moving there went from a depth of 70,000 to 10. Without the assumptions that I made earlier (skipping pages and using different types), there are likely to come across several more places.

Add to some other basic SEOs such as meaningful URLs, meaningful headlines, keywords in headings, and you're pretty much there.

Answer 2

Someone said this before.

He has no idea what he is talking about, and he cannot provide a solution because there are no problems. Idiots, considering that /category?page=2 not "SEO", did it like /category/2 , which is a completely different link. You will lose the link juice on this bullshit, and not concentrate on the category link. I think Google can handle both cases well, but the page should be a parameter.

Answer 3

My understanding of the term “flat architecture” is that it refers to the physical structure of the site: maintaining the directory structure is “flat” rather than numerous subfolders.

Another opinion is that this means that you have as few links from your home page to specific content as possible - the reason for this is to facilitate the search for search engines; IMHO I think the user experience we need to worry more. But this is not relevant.

Regardless, the structure of the site has nothing to do with pagination, which is associated with the presentation of a large set of structured data (or "elements") in pieces that are easier to handle. This has several motives:

• It loads 25 elements faster, which is 250,000, especially with the 56K modem, which is probably the era in which paging was invented.
• Users will be easily put off by a massive list, so that the quick return of a small number of items is more accessible.
• It is easier to imagine a limited and known number of elements, unexpectedly long lists can play havoc with good formatting / graphics, etc.

I think the answer to your question is that you should first focus on user experience and good content. I would definitely pay attention to proven SEO methods, but I would not let them manage your design at the expense of all other aspects.

Answer 4

One simple approach is to rely on search and filtering. You show what is suitable on the page, if the user wants to see more, then he should narrow the search.

One example of this is LinkedIn, they only show the first 10 pages.

Another example is Facebook or Youtube, where the list gets longer as you scroll down, but you don't switch paqges.