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This post is now (mostly) obsolete and replaced by WordPress SEO Pager —

→ WordPress SEO Pager

I know of many architectural mistakes that can totally torpedo a web site's rankings — using URL-based session IDs, adding duplicate content for fun, etc.  But one thing stands out in WordPress blogs as a culprit.  I call it "death by pagination," and it's another way to screw yourself.

It's common knowledge that pages buried deeply within a web site, for various reasons, will likely not rank as well as those that are linked from top-level pages.  Typically, the solution employed is a site map.  This mitigates the problem by creating one link to deeper pages from a page that is only 1 level deep.

Without that, simple "< prev next >" pagination causes certain items (in this case posts), to be buried several pages deep within a site structure that looks like this:

[ A -> B -> C -> D ]

Here, page "D" is 4 levels deep.  Usually, it's not linked from anywhere else, either.  In a blog, this would occur when the pagination is performed in 10s, and there are >= 31 posts in a category or month.  On my blog, that's pretty likely, and the first post in a given month would be on page "D."  Categories only get larger over time as well.

There are two approaches to fixing the problem.

1. Don't use simple-pagination.  Page with "< prev" and "next >" as well as links to the individual pages.
2. Add a sitemap

Examples of "1" can be seen on this page on one of my sites and also on the SEOmoz blog:

To do this in wordpress, add this little plugin:

<?

/*
Plugin Name: PagerFix
Plugin URI: http://www.seoegghead.com/
Description: Makes the paging in WP more SE-friendly.
Author: Jaimie Sirovich
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://www.seoegghead.com/
*/ 

function pager_fix($seperator = ' | ', $after_previous = '&nbsp;&nbsp;', $before_next = '&nbsp;&nbsp;', $prelabel='&laquo; Previous Page', $nxtlabel='Next Page &raquo;', $current_page_tag = 'b')
{    
    global $request, $posts_per_page, $wpdb, $paged;
    
    posts_nav_link('',$prelabel,'');
    echo $after_previous;
    preg_match('#FROM (.*) GROUP BY#', $request, $matches);
    $fromwhere = $matches[1];
    $numposts = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(ID) FROM $fromwhere");
    $max_num_pages = ceil($numposts / $posts_per_page);

    if ($max_num_pages > 1) {

        for ($cnt = 1; $cnt <= $max_num_pages; $cnt++) {

            if ($current_page_tag && $paged == $cnt) {
                $begin_link = "<$current_page_tag>"; $end_link = "</$current_page_tag>";
            } else {
                $begin_link = ''; $end_link = '';
            }
            
            $x[] = $begin_link . '<a href="' . get_pagenum_link($cnt) . '">' . $cnt . '</a>' . $end_link;
            
        }
    
        echo join($seperator, $x);
        
    }
    echo $before_next;
    posts_nav_link('','',$nxtlabel);
    
}

?>

Then call the function "pager_fix()" in your template somewhere.

To accomplish "2," use this plugin.  I use this plugin — here is my sitemap.

Side Note: You can also use the links generated by the calendar control in WordPress to partially address this; but I feel this introduces other problems, including duplicate content issues.  For this reason I do not recommend it.

Of course this concept does not only apply to blogs.  I see plenty of other web sites that would benefit from fixing their paging features up like this.