If your site has a blog that spans multiple pages of posts, a product catalog with category listings, or search results pages that load through paginated chunks, you’re using something called pagination whether you’ve thought about it or not. And if you’ve looked for advice on how to get it right for SEO, you’ve probably found a lot of outdated info.
The reality is that pagination still very much matters for improving website speed, server performance, and user navigation. The key is making sure it’s set up in a way that helps users move through your site without creating unnecessary SEO problems.
Forget the Old Pagination Playbook
First, let’s clear up the old SEO pagination advice that people received for years. The recommended approach for paginated content was to add special code called rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags, which were meant to tell Google how pages in a series were related. If you’ve read an older article advocating the use of these tags, it’s not that those tags no longer exist. They do.
It’s just that Google largely stopped using them in 2019, when the company confirmed that they were no longer being used as a ranking or crawling signal. They don’t do any harm if they’re still there, but if you’re adding them today in the hopes that Google will crawl and rank your paginated content properly, they’re not going to accomplish that.
So if that old Google pagination solution no longer applies, why is pagination still important? Because the way you structure paginated content can still have a real impact on whether Google can find, understand, and properly index your pages. Google has simply gotten better at figuring out the relationships between those pages in other ways.
How Google Handles Pagination Now
Google handles pagination through the site’s link structure, rather than the rel tags, meaning actual links between page 1, page 2, and page 3 matter more, not less. Your internal links also matter more than they used to as a result of this change.
If you’re only able to reach a paginated series by clicking through “load more” buttons or infinite-scrolling content with no clear series of links, Google won’t necessarily be able to index everything past page one. This can be an easy-to-miss problem when a website shifts to a more modern (read: JavaScript-heavy) design.
Infinite scroll design can be aesthetically pleasing to visitors, but if there’s no crawlable path to the content further down the page, a significant chunk of your site can effectively go off the grid to search engines, even though it appears perfectly fine to human site visitors.
The Canonical Tag That Continues to Snare Sites
The canonical tag advice that still comes up even today is canonicalizing each paginated page to page one. This is based on the old “pages 2+ are simply an extension of page 1” theory of pagination. The issue with canonical tags is, it can prevent crawlers from ever indexing legitimately unique content that appears on pages 2, 3, 4, etc.
If all subsequent pages say, “this page is canonical to page 1” through a rel canonical tag, search engines may treat those pages as duplicates rather than pages worth indexing on their own. Best practice today is to make each paginated page self-canonical rather than canonicalizing everything back to page 1.
Why This Still Matters for Your Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is essentially the amount of time and resources a search engine is willing to spend crawling pages on your site. Search engines can’t crawl every page on the internet constantly, so they have to decide where to focus their attention. Every page Googlebot crawls uses some of those resources, which makes it important to ensure crawlers are spending their time on pages you want discovered and indexed.
Having a bad pagination structure wastes crawl budget on content you don’t really care to highlight, and in the worst case, keeps the rest of your site’s content from being indexed at all. If your site is a multi-product catalog, a large blog, or similar content heavy structure, getting the pagination right can be the key to having everything indexable and visible to search engines.
What a Good Pagination Structure Looks Like Today
The modern, savvy approach to paged content typically involves creating real, crawlable links across paginated pages, using self-referential canonical tags on each page so Google understands it as its own page rather than a copy of another one, and making a considered decision about whether each page offers enough unique value to justify indexing.
If your site uses infinite scroll but you don’t want large chunks of content missing from the index, pairing it with a well-structured traditional pagination setup can give you the best of both worlds for users and search engines.
Have Magna Technology Take a Look
Pagination problems are not always obvious from the front end of a website. The scrollbar still looks perfect, and no broken-link warning appears. Nothing about your paginated content necessarily looks broken, which is what makes these issues so easy to miss. Without knowing what to look for, even a perfectly functional paginated series can be causing serious indexing problems behind the scenes.
Making sure the content on your site is properly accessible and indexable is part of the overall health checks we incorporate into how we manage our customers’ websites. If you have paginated content that may be limiting indexability or search visibility, let Magna Technology take a quick look to make sure everything is structured in a way that gives your content the best chance to appear in search.