Seo Implications of Link Rel=Next/Prev in Header

Recently, I wanted to split a post of several thousand words into multiple pages for better readability. I looked for the best SEO practices on pagination and found out that Google posted a video on exactly that subject just a few days prior ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njn8uXTWiGg ).

According to the video, Google wants you to use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” to let the bots know that a particular URL is part of a multi-page article.

Lo and behold, I take a look at my website’s source code and discover that WordPress already does that — but not in the way Google suggests. Every post has a rel=”prev” pointing to the previous post as well as a rel=”next” pointing to the next, and as a special bonus, I see a rel=”start” pointing to my very first post ever.

If I’m understanding Google’s video correctly, the SEO implications of this are very, very bad, as if I’m telling Google that each post is part of a series when in fact they have nothing to do with one another — and I don’t even understand why I would want every post on my website to reference the very first. This isn’t a personal blog.

I’m no SEO expert, though. Could anyone help me understand what the SEO implications would be if I left the rel=”prev”, rel=”next” and rel=”start” code in my header as it is, and what the accessibility implications would be if I removed it?

Thanks so much.