Add rel="next" and rel="prev" to Category Blog Page

[elioverbey]

I followed Brian's directions on How to Create a Category Blog Page...

Step #1
Create a new page and title this page whatever you’d like. On the right side of the page editor, choose the blog page template.

Step #2
Next, you’ll need to add a custom field to your page. Scroll down to the custom field meta box, and create a new custom field by clicking the Add Custom Field button.

Note: if the custom field option seems unavailable, click the “Screen Options” tab on the upper right. A drop down will appear with a number of screen options. Check the box to show the custom field box.

Add the text query_args as the name of the custom field. For the value, use cat=1. In this case, the number 1 is the ID of the category of posts you’d like to display on this page. Change the ID to the category of posts you’d like to display.

We recommend installing the Reveal IDs plugin to find your category ID.

Step #3
Publish your page, and that’s it. You now have a page that displays posts from a category of your choosing. To select how many posts to show, you can go to the Genesis -> Theme Settings -> Blog Page Template section in your dashboard.

It worked great! I have two blogs on our site.. One was: http://thriveworks.com/blog, and the other was located at http://thriveworks.com/blog/category/counseling-blog (UGLY URL), but this fixed all of that.

I was able to create a page entitled 'counseling-blog', so now we have a Category Blog page at http://thriveworks.com/counseling-blog ....

But here's the problem:

SEO Yoast doesn't see that. On the blog page, we normally have:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://thriveworks.com/blog/category/counseling-blog/page/2/" />
<link rel="prev" href="http://thriveworks.com/blog/category/counseling-blog/" />
<link rel="next" href="http://thriveworks.com/blog/category/counseling-blog/page/3/" />

Which is outstanding because we need the next and prev so Google knows where to go, plus, it's SEO. But, with the new directions to add a category page, all we have is:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://thriveworks.com/blog/category/counseling-blog/page/2/" />

There is no rel="next" or rel="prev"... My guess is because the Yoast plugin does not know that the page is functioning as a blog page. Any thoughts on how to add next and prev to the Category Blog Page? I really want to leave it at http://thriveworks.com/counseling-blog/ because it looks so much better, but I need the prev and next.

I thought the page would add those tags because the template is set as blog. This may be more of an issue for Yoast, but maybe there is a Genesis fix?

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Let me help you customize your theme, or help your with SEO. Current Sr. SEO Analyst at Worldwide NonProfit
Visit me here: elioverbey.net | Connect on Twitter

http://thriveworks.com/counseling-blog/

[nutsandbolts]

You can add the next and prev tags in the Scripts box - it's under the page editor if you edit your Counseling Blog page (the one using the custom template). If you don't see it, drop down Screen Options and check the box to show it. That area is for any kind of code, script, etc. you need to output on an individual post or page but not on the rest of the site. Try that out, then check your page source to be sure it's showing up. Let me know if that doesn't work!

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Andrea Whitmer, Owner/Developer, Nuts and Bolts Media
I provide development and training services for designers • Find me on Twitter and Google+

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