Before anything else, yes, Google no longer takes note of rel prev / next and has not done so (officially) for nearly a year. Google officially deprecated rel prev / next as a crawl / indexing factor on March 21st, 2019:
Unofficially, Google stopped taking note of rel prev / next several years before that.
But, as with any web document meta information, just because Google isn't using rel prev / next, doesn't mean it no longer represents useful library information.
In fact, Google itself even highlights this:
rel prev / next may, not least:
- assist accessibility
- represent a
resource pre-fetchinghint to browsers.
So, here I am, one year after the official announcement still using rel prev / next perfectly happily to create a chain of product pages which each show and discuss one of a set of associated products.
To date, I have use rel prev / next to indicate a straight line of product pages from first product page to last product page:
Product 1 Page ==> Product 2 Page ==> Product 3 Page
That's it.
Consequently:
- Product 1 Page doesn't have a
<link rel="prev">; and - Product 3 Page doesn't have a
<link rel="next">
But would there be anything nonsensical and / or illegitimate about giving Product 3 Page a <link rel="next"> which points to Product 1 Page and vice versa?
e.g. Product 3 ==> Product 1 ==> Product 2 ==> Product 3 ==> Product 1
I'd very much like to implement this, but I want to check first that creating a circular sequence of pages isn't, in principle, an abuse of pagination, somehow.
C => A => B => C => A => Betc. is a legitimate series forrel prev / nextlinks?rel prev / nextis appropriate to use between product pages at all. There isn't a particular order in which product pages have to be viewed. Prev and next are for things like pagination that have a definite order.