Today I am continuing my review of WordPress plugins used on this site. This posts looks at the WP-PageNavi WordPress plugin. You can see it in action at the bottom of my home page.
If you look at the bottom of most blog home pages you will see a Next and Previous link which allow visitors to view older or more recent blog posts. I’ve no idea whether many people use these links, but they are only really useful for finding posts created in the last few weeks or so. These links are not very practical for finding posts buried deep in your blog archives.
I’ve also read that web crawlers don’t like these Next and Previous links either. These crawlers (also known as web spiders or robots) are small pieces of software (called bots) sent out by search engines such as Google to index your blog. Most crawlers like to be able to get to any page on your blog within a few clicks. If a crawler can’t get to each page in a few clicks then you are making it more difficult for your blog to be indexed by the search engines.
It has been suggested that replacing the Next and Previous links with a pagination structure as follows is more friendly to crawlers trying to index your site.
1 2 3 4 5 »…Last »
Each of the page numbers is a hyperlink which the user can click on to jump to that page. This enables visitors to access older articles with fewer clicks, and web crawling spiders will like it too.
You can customize the pagination look and feel via the plugin options page.
There are other methods to help visitors access older articles on your blog which personally I think are more effective than the pagination plugin. These can include creating a site map which lists all your blog posts and pages on a single page, or an archives page, both of these topics I will go into in more detail in later posts.
Even so, I think having a page navigation system like WP-PageNavi can do harm in trying to maximize your site’s accessibility.
How do you navigate around blogs and other web sites you visit? Do you ever use the Next and Previous links?
- Leave a comment
- Subscribe
- FREE Newsletter
- del.icio.us
- Stumble it!
- Digg It
5 responses so far ↓
1 scoop // Mar 22, 2008 at 2:59 am
Thanks for the tutorial and information.
2 Josh // Jan 1, 2009 at 2:59 am
Hmm, I’m not sure if I would agree with you. I mean honestly, if pagination was going to hurt your site when it comes to optimization… Do you really think that google would use the “gooooooooooooooooooooooogle” pagination when you search?
Also, most people do use the pagination to navigate through a site rather than trying to skim their way through a sitemap. Most generally sitemaps are there for the bots, not for the humans.
I agree that sitemaps and archive pages can be useful to humans at times, but most of us don’t use them on a regular basis… We’re all about laziness, so if we can simply click on 1,2,3,4,5,etc… and see visually what we’re looking for, rather than opening the sitemap and scrolling down endlessly until we find a text link that we “think” might be what we’re looking for… we’re gonna do it.
3 Dean // Jan 1, 2009 at 9:15 am
It is true that sitemaps are generally there for the bots, and if your site has many pages then they will not be very user friendly. Fair comment.
Another technique worth considering is creating a landing page which can be used for several ideas, such as highlighting some of your best content or helping users find the content they might be looking for.
4 Bamarlay // Mar 6, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Thanks for the information on pagination. I was actually finding ways to breakdown the long blog posts into smaller ones and I found the other useful wordpress plugin. I like the idea and installed it instantly. (Actually, the page-navi plugin was inside my blog for a long time but I never activated it. Thanks for the article.
By the way, for the site-map, I use the separate archive page instead. I use the Clean Archive Reloaded plugin and all my old posts are there, in the Archive page. The yearly and monthly archives are collapsible so it is really clean.
5 Kamal // Aug 18, 2009 at 5:42 pm
thanks for nice tutorial i am planning to use the same for my website http://www.voteupindia.com
I am sure it will be useful for me and the users of my site..thanks man,..great job
Leave a Comment