SEO pagination for items sorted in reverse chronological order

Question

Let's have items I90, I89, ..., I2, I1 where I1 is the oldest and I100 is the newest. They are paginated and there are 30 items per page.

Which is better URL from SEO point of view?

1) /items?page=1 with items I90...I61; then /items?page=2 with items I60...I31 and /items?page=3 with I30...I1. So if the new item is created, items get shifted.

2) /items?page=3 with items I90..I61; ...; /items?page=1 for I30...I1.

Will option 1) look more "alive" to a search engine, so it will rank higher? Or will stable data (option 2) rank higher?

Answer 1

Neither. Not for SEO. However, I personally would chose option 1. That way your fist page is always 1 and not ?? The URI keywords item and page are not offering value from an SEO point of view. If you can change this to something more meaningful, then perhaps the answer would be different.

Clear as mud?

Answer 2

It is better to list the newest items in the first page, as your website will be more live, and most of the visitors will want to see the fresh arrivals. But it would be also good to provide an option for sorting items by popularity or better display some popular items at the sidebar (actually this is great usability + SEO).

To make better user friendly urls, I suggest:

example.com/cpu/  - For the first page. Lists the newest 30/50/100/1000 items
example.com/cpu/1 - Should redirect 301 to the first page
example.com/cpu/2 - For the second page
example.com/cpu/3 - For the third page

Some thoughts on the SEO:

Pages with pagination are archive pages, in which you have lists of items/posts that link to the full post (item page). These pages are low quality, with no distinct content, duplicate titles and meta tags. Search engines do not like archives pages, except from the first page of each archive, which is perfectly ranked.

Adding tags and more categories to improve your site, will be a great feature but you will end up having a lot of archive pages eg: for the tag a,b,c,d etc or the category a, b, c, d

For each tag page you will have 1 or more products and if you have lots of products matching a tag, you will may have 100 numbers in the pagination. So only for one tag, you will have 100 low quality pages. And if you have 10 tags x 100 pages this will add 1000 low quality pages on your index.

To avoid seo penalties with all these urls, but keeping them as it is a great feature, I suggest that you noindex all pages expect the first one for each archive page. For example:

example.com/cpu/ - This is the page we wish to rank in search engines
example.com/software/ - This is also a page we wish to rank in search engines
example.com/cpu/2 - This page should be noindexed
example.com/cpu/3 - This page should be noindexed
example.com/software/154 - This page should also be noindexed

Answer 3

If the paginated pages are useful (*) for searchers, your variant 2) offers the benefit of stable URLs. Thereby the ranking for each of those pages can (possibly) increase over time.

If you’d use variant 1) instead, the content will change radically, i.e., some time later the same URL has totally different content (not merely changed/updated content, but possibly even unrelated content). No sensible ranking algorithm would rank such pages permanently high, as soon all the keywords on the pages will change. So then there is nothing "old" to rank for anymore.
Also, this variant has the problem for searchers that search engines still might have old versions of your pages indexed, i.e., the link in the search result might no longer point to the relevant page where the searcher finds the content he was looking for. (Happens to me very often, and that’s my main reason to use the not-so-common reversed ordering.)

(* But note that many paginated pages are not very useful for searchers, especially when each item has a dedicated page and the content on the paginated pages is using only excerpts. For those cases, it probably doesn’t matter, as search engines are likely to pay little heed to them.)