Google chooses “View all” over multiple page content

Google’s user testing has come up with what we all know and have experienced very often. It is far less annoying to view an article’s entire content in one go, then it is to have to keep clicking “next” in order to see it piece by piece. I find this especially true when using a mobile device on the go, if your connection is a bit patchy than it is a royal pain to have to keep loading the next page again and again. Also from an internet marketing company perspective it is far easier to provide a stronger SEO service when a website is less diluted by keeping relevant content together in one place.

The people at Google have finally cottoned on to this fact and are making some significant changes to make things a little easier. From now on if there is a “single page” or “view all” version of a website’s content, the search engine will do its best to return that as part of its results instead of the series of component pages.

However while every internet marketing company offering SEO services will massively approve of this change, there is from time to time a website, where it is actually better to view  their articles in parts. This can be for a number of reasons such as the high latency that can be experienced when an article is very large or is dynamic content rich, or if the layout or design of a website just doesn’t lend itself well to long pages of content making it had to navigate.

So what can you do if your website suffers from one of these problems? Well there is a number of easy ways to make sure that your single page version does not appear in the search results. These are relatively simple methods you have probably thought of yourself if you are a web developer and that is to mark the view all page as “no index”. You will also want to make sure that none of your component pages include a rel=”canonical” link to the view all page.

Another way of pushing your component pages to the surface over the “view all” page, is to make sure each page of content is linked using  rel=”next” and rel=”prev”. Doing this will send a strong hint to Google that significantly helps the search engine determine the relationships between each series of pages. Using these links will allow Google’s algorithm to consolidate the indexing properties of each page and drive users towards the one with the most relevant content, which in most cases is the first page.