Rel="self" and what to do with it?

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

Hey there Mozzers,

Another question about a forum issue I encountered.

When a forum thread has more than just one page as we all know the best course of action is to use

rel="next"

rel="prev" or rel="previous"

But my forum automatically creates another line in the header called

Rel="self"

What that does is simple.

If i have 3 pages

http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3

**instead of this **

On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1

On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2

On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3:

it creates this

On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1

So as you can see it creates a url by adding the ?page=1 and names it rel=self which actually gives back a duplicate page because now instead of just

http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1

I also have the same page at

http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1?page=1

Do i even need rel="self"? I thought that rel="next" and rel="prev" was enough?

Should I change that?

[RyanPurkey]

That is odd. I'm unfamiliar with that markup other than as an RSS emulation here: https://gist.github.com/jonathantneal/5096851 and used with RSS / Atom feeds: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287.  Maybe your forum software is doing them in this way in order to provide users with the corresponding RSS feed when subscribing to the post.  I'd look into the documentation for your forum software to try and get a better insight into why it's there.  Cheers!