How does Google understand what pages are in a set of pagination? Well, with the rel prev and next no longer being supported, Google has given other advice. Google’s John Mueller was asked about this in a video hangout last week, and while he said having page numbers in your titles and headers help a little, your internal navigation links matter more.

At the 17:36 mark into the video, John addressed the question by saying that while headers and page titles with the number of the page set helps Google a little bit. He said what Google really seems to do is see the next and previous buttons in your paginated content navigation, to determine what is part of the set.

Listen to the video, click play and it should start in the right position:

Here is the transcript:

That is, it helps until Google gets it wrong? But that is your job, SEOs, make sure Google doesn’t get it wrong.

Forum discussion at YouTube Community.