Take a look at the search engine results pages, forums, personal blogs, and discussion boards. At the bottom of the page are icons or buttons directing readers/viewers to the next and previous pages of the search engine results, forums, blog posts, and discussion threads. These buttons are pagination tags or often referred to as the ref=”prev” and ref=”next” attributes.

You might think that this is nothing new at all but actually, these were only implemented by Google in September 2011; and now Bing follows suit.

Caption: The “Prev” and “Next” functions of the pagination tags, ref=”prev” and ref=”next”.

Bing recommends that these attributes be used for web pages whose contents are too long, they need to be split into multiple pages for aesthetics’ sake. This is frequently done in health and beauty websites wherein each step of how-to articles or each item in a skin-care regimen article are given their own individual pages.

This can also be done in news feeds, blog rolls, and other similar sites should the administrators want their readers to view articles/web pages in a particular sequence. A news blog, for example, is likely to sequence its published articles from most recent to the oldest. Continue reading