: Should you noidex paginated pages or use rel=next/rel=prev On out site we use pagination in two places: 1) Category Pages We have our articles segmented by category and each category has 100's

@Miguel251

I use both noindex and rel=next/prev on my paginated pages 2-N

noindex does not stop link juice from flowing, it flows through the noindex page. Remember that noindex only means "don't index" it does NOT mean "don't crawl".

robots.txt disallow will stop link juice from flowing.

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@Eichhorn148

I would carry on using pagination mark up on both sets of paginated pages.

Google introduced the mark up for this specific purpose, it provides a hint to Google that you would like to treat the paginated pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page.

If you noindex the paginated pages you would be missing out on those benefits. For instance say somebody linked to page 4 on your paginated page, if it was noindexed the weight from that backlink would be lost, but if using rel=next/rel=prev mark-up, this link weight would be counted to the sequence as a whole.

The two examples you posted are two of the same examples Google give in their specifications:


News and/or publishing sites often divide a long article into several
shorter pages.

Retail sites may divide the list of items in a large product category
into multiple pages.


More info on Indicating Paginated Content from Google

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