Google is giving preference to single-page versions of a web page as opposed to component pages that contain only a portion of the information, forcing the user to click to "next" and load another URL.

Paginated content, in other words, can be counted as another factor it likely considers in search rankings.

Some publishers may meet this news with dismay. As Silicon Filter points out pagination can artificially pump up page views and allows them to serve more ads to their readers. Google, though, has found that searchers vastly prefer the view-all version as opposed to paginated content with arbitrary page breaks and worse latency.

Google walks webmasters through the change in this post, providing details on:

1] how to make the view-all version of a website’s content more explicit to Google

2] whether you have to worry if when a user searches for a query term and page-all.html is selected in search results, but the query is most related to page-2.html and

3] what to do if you really don’t want view-all page to appear in search results.