The attributes rel=’next’ and rel=’prev’ are standard HTML mark-up. These attributes can be used on component pages in the series to indicate to Google (and other search engines) that these are individual pages but they all belong to one series.
These (rel next and rel prev) attributes:
- Connect pages,
- Consolidate the links and other indexing properties on the pages and
- Identify the most relevant page to show in search results.
and ensure that all the component pages are indexed. This is in contrast to the rel='canonical' link which also consolidates pages but even though the attributes shown above apply only the canonical version is indexed.