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

Question

I've been reading the book "The Art of SEO", a very good book about SEO in my opinion. In the sixth chapter of this book, the authors assert the importance of a flat architecture for a website from a SEO perspective and they recommend the webmasters to avoid the use of pagination because it facilitates a deep architecture and lets some content be inaccesible unless an high number of clicks. The authors missed the chance to give also one or more advice to solve the problem they have raised.

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

Sicyon

stephanspencer.com/category/general/page/2, he should "optimize" his homepage first (HTML is standard WP horror BTW). Just do like this /category?page=2 not /category/2, and no problems. – Forethought

@Gabriel - Yes, either that or have no data :) – Rawson

Answer 1

The key isn't avoiding pagination but not relying on pagination. When you rely on it to display large lists of content you enforce this "many clicks" navigation. What you want is for a user (and hence also robots) to have easier and more meaningful ways to get to your content.

Generally when you're looking at pagination you're at a point of the IA that doesn't easily break down into a hierarchical structure. At this point the best approach to get through a large amount of content is filtering using tags.

Take SO as a good example, which essentially has no IA beyond big giant paginated list of questions. The main question page has at the moment 142414 pages. If this was the only way to find relevant content it would be a NIGHTMARE. But a good tag system suddenly makes it easy to use. For the sake of simplicity let's pretend that the paginator only has prev and next and there's only one sort order, in reality these features help improve the depth of questions in a similar manner by giving shortcuts through the list but no where near as strongly as tags.

Once you click on a tag you get links which add related tags. You can very quickly narrow down questions. Let's think about navigating to a question somewhere in the middle, I picked Blind RSA signature using .NET cryptography API? which was on page 70,000.

This would take 70,000 clicks to reach normally, this is obviously very bad SEO. From the Tags page (1 click) "Encryption" is on page 6 (6 clicks) add in "Cryptography" (7 clicks) add in "rsa" (8 clicks) and in ".net" (9 clicks) and the question appears on the page. Navigating there has gone from a depth of 70,000 to 10. Without the assumptions I made earlier (skipping pages and using different sort) would likely bump this up a few more places.

Add in some other basic SEO such as meaningful URLs, meaningful titles, keywords in headers and you're pretty much there.

Childress

Answer 2

Someone said it before.

He doesn't have a clue what he is talking about and he can't provide an solution because there is no problem. Idiots considering that /category?page=2 isn't 'SEO' made it like this /category/2, which is completely another link. You will lose link juice on these nonsense instead of concentrating it on category link. I think Google can handle both cases well, but page should be parameter.

Shoveler

Answer 3

My understanding of the term "flat architecture" is that it refers to the physical structure of a site: keeping the directory structure "flat" instead of numerous nested folders.

Another view is that it means you have as few links as possible from the home page to specific content - the reason for this is to make it easier for Search Engines to find; IMHO I think it's the users experience we should be more worried about. But that's beside the point.

Regardless, the structure of the site has nothing at all to do with pagination, which is concerned with presenting large set's of structured data (or "items") in chunks that are easier to deal with. This has several motivations:

• It's quicker to download 25 items that 250,000, especially over a 56K modem which is probably the era in which pagination was invented.
• Users will be easily put off by a massive list, so quickly returning a small bunch of items is more accessible.
• It's easier to present a limited and known number of items, unexpectedly long lists can play havoc with nice formatting / graphics, etc.

I think the answer to your question is that you should focus first on the user experience and good content. I would definitely pay attention to proven SEO techniques but I wouldn't let them rule your design at the cost of all other aspects.

Rawson

I think web designers by architecture mean information architecture, which is basically about structuring your web into sites and placing and grouping information on every individual site. So your second argument does apply and I agree with you. – Ferret

Pagination + search, if you load 250.000 rows, it will have large amount of impact on server. – Forethought

Dear Adrian K, first of all, thanks for the answer. By "flat architecture", the authors means "you have as few links as possible from the home page to specific content". I think, as you say, that pagination works well for (real, not crawler) users but reading the assert of those authors was interesting and so I would to better undestand their point of view and so...the question. From all the answers I've got from this post, I understand that maybe my (and your) opinion in using pagination is better than authors says. Thanks so much to all. – Sicyon

Answer 4

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

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

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

Egression