Question

So, I’m adding link tags with SEO information about the previous and next page on our site, something like this:

<link rel="prev" href="/60072-page=2" />
<link rel="next" href="/60072-page=4" />

The page can contain multiple lists with paging. Changing the page of a list reloads the lists content with ajax, but there is also a fallback by using normal postbacks if javascript is disabled. These paging links are the same that should be in the examples above.

But since the page can have multiple lists it also means that I should have multiple link tags, like so:

<link rel="prev" href="/60072-page=2" />
<link rel="next" href="/60072-page=4" />
<link rel="prev" href="/15678-page=1" />
<link rel="next" href="/15678-page=3" />

Is this okay? I tried to Google it, but I can’t find any information about having more links than the two default ones. Thank you for your help!

Answer 1

Syntactically it’s legal according to the W3C, however it appears like CSS in the case of duplicated information, the last rule wins out. The spec says:

Next – Refers to the next document in a linear sequence of documents. User agents may choose to preload the "next" document, to
reduce the perceived load time.

Prev – Refers to the previous document in an ordered series of documents. Some user agents also support the synonym "Previous".

So next/prev refer to a linear sequence of documents and not all links on a page. So based on your example, only

<link rel="prev" href="/15678-page=1" />
<link rel="next" href="/15678-page=3" />

would be relevant.