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?
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1 response so far ↓
1 scoop // Mar 22, 2008 at 2:59 am
Thanks for the tutorial and information.
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