Yesterday during the webmaster hangout, I noticed that the documentation on "Indicating paginated content to Google" that talks about rel=next/prev is now gone, 404ing. Also, the blog post about it from 2011 in bold reads at the top "Note: The information in this post is outdated. Rel=prev/next is not an indexing signal anymore."

Here is a screen shot:

I wonder what changes are happening around this? I have not heard anything from Google's John Mueller about this and we did bring up rel=next/prev twice in the Google hangout from the other day. He didn't mention it when we said the page was 404ing.

Update: John said that Google hasn't been using them for indexing for a couple years now, so they removed it from the docs:

We noticed that we weren't using rel-next/prev in indexing for a number of years now, so we thought we might as well remove the docs :). — 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 21, 2019

For the most part, we just index the pages as we find them, so as we've recommended for a long time, it's good to make sure that all pages can stand on their own. — 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 21, 2019

Since it hasn't been used for a while, it seems like most sites are doing pagination in reasonable ways that work regardsless of these links. People make good sites, for a large part :). — 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 21, 2019

Wow - Google stopped using it completely!

We don't use link-rel-next/prev at all. — 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) March 21, 2019

Google is now telling people to go with single page content going forward where possible:

Spring cleaning!



As we evaluated our indexing signals, we decided to retire rel=prev/next.

Studies show that users love single-page content, aim for that when possible, but multi-part is also fine for Google Search. Know and do what's best for *your* users! #springiscoming pic.twitter.com/hCODPoKgKp — Google Webmasters (@googlewmc) March 21, 2019

Just weird.

So beware, something is changing to how Google handles rel=next/prev. You can see the original story on this over here.

Additional hat tip to:

FYI G doesn't support rel=next/prev (apperently it hasn't for years). It treats paginted pages just like any other page on your website.



The offcial documentation has been removed from the GSC help docs and the blog post highlight it's out of date.



More info to come...@JohnMu pic.twitter.com/eQpT62lVpV — Adam Gent 👾🤖👓 (@Adoubleagent) March 21, 2019

Forum discussion at Twitter.