Ruby needs a {{pagination}} element to service non-scrolling crawlers

[cathysarisky]

Ruby is missing a {{pagination}} element from the index page. The result is that Google Bot (which does not scroll) never reaches later posts.

No impact on human visitors (due to infinite scroll), but the inability of the GoogleBot to reach /page/2 of content has SEO implications.

[minimaluminium]

Hey @cathysarisky, a good point. Just curious if that really helps SEO though 🤔. There's also a link element in the header that links to the next page <link rel="next" href="https://ruby.ghost.io/page/2/"> which should be more logical place for crawlers to look for the next page which is also mentioned here.

[cathysarisky]

I've confirmed that my version of Ruby does have that <link> element, and I agree that it's supposed to help crawlers find the second page. But I can also tell you that I didn't see my page/2/ or page/3/ urls show up in GSC until I added the actual <a> links to the page. And until I did so, these pages said they had zero pages linking to them, so even if the crawler can find them, it may not be propagating page rank through <link elements?

And then I googled it, and there ya go: Google doesn't use rel=next/prev at all.