Google Forgets to Announce a Major Change - SEO Community Disappointed - Search Engine Journal

• Updated on: 2019-03-23
• Read original article here

Several years ago Google quietly stopped using the Rel=prev/next indexing signal. Google continued to encourage publishers to the indexing signal.  Years later Google tweeted an announcement that the indexing signal was no longer in use. The SEO and publishing community responded with disappointment and confusion.

Rel=prev/next was an indexing signal that Google advised publishers to use as a hint that a group of pages were part of a series of related pages. This allowed publishers to break up a document into several pages while still having the entire multi-page document considered as one document.

This was useful for long articles as well as for long forum discussions that can span to multiple pages.

From the perspective of web publishers it certainly felt like a major change. The indexing signal gave publishers the ability to help Google figure out complex site navigation.

There was no official announcement. Google simply issued a years late tweet.

Google removed the webmaster support page entirely and replaced it with a 404 response. No explanation.

Then Google updated the original blog post from 2011 to note that the guidance in the announcement was cancelled.

Under the leadership of Matt Cutts, Google endeavored to liaison with publishers to keep them updated on ways publishers could help improve their sites in a way that adhered to Google best practices.

This is why it came as a shock that Google had stopped using an important indexing signal and didn’t bother to tell publishers.

As recently as January 2019, Google’s John Mueller was encouraging publishers to use the indexing signal, even though Google no longer used it.

In a Google Webmaster Hangout from January 2019, a publisher asked Google’s John Mueller about what he could to do force Google to show content from the first page of a paginated set of content instead of one of the inner pages.

John Mueller responded by affirming that Google tries to use the Rel=prev/next. He didn’t say that Google had already stopped using Rel=prev/next.

Mueller affirmed that Google was using it, even though Google had in fact been using it.

It may be that John Mueller did not know that it had been years since Google had used that indexing signal.

The SEO and publishing community responded in two ways. Some accepted the development quietly. But it seemed like most people were upset that Google had continued telling publishers to use something that Google had stopped responding to.

Edward Lewis, a search marketer since 1995, noted that link prev-rel is a part of the HTML specification. So while Google may not be using them as a pagination hint, it is still a relevant HTML element and there is no need to take down existing code.

“Link Relationships (next, prev) have been in the HTML Specification long before Google finally read the instructions on how to use them. So “Google Says” and now everybody is whining about the time they invested to setup their pages properly which should have been done to begin with. I wonder how many will now remove their link relationships just because “Google Says.”

Others in the community noted that Rel=prev/next was an important tool for helping Google make sense of complex site architecture.

Alan Bleiweiss observed that some sites are highly complex. He remarked that he did not trust Google to automatically be able to sort out the complexity.

Cyrus Shepard was non-judgmental. He tweeted a proactive and pragmatic course of action.

We who work online are pretty much living in Google’s world. Google is the hand that feeds many publishers.

Yet it is, as Danny Sullivan called it, an ecosystem. Google thrives when publishers thrive.