If you’re curious about the rel=”next” and rel=prev” for paginated content announcement Google made several months ago, Google filmed a video covering more of the basics of pagination to help answer questions. Paginated content includes things like an article that spans several URLs/pages, or an e-commerce product category that spans multiple pages. With rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup, you can provide a strong hint to Google that you would like Google to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page.

Feel free to check out Google’s presentation for more information:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html