Sometimes, you have content that's too long for one page, or you have a list of items (like blog posts or products) that stretches across many pages. Splitting this content into a series of sequential pages is called pagination. You see this often on blog archives (Page 1, Page 2, Page 3) or product category pages.
Handling pagination correctly is important for SEO to make sure all your content gets found and understood by search engines, without causing problems.
Why Pagination Can Be Tricky for SEO
Pagination can create a few challenges for search engines:
Looks Like Duplicate Content: Pages 2, 3, and beyond in a series often have very similar elements to Page 1, like the header, footer, sidebar, and sometimes even introductory text. While the main content list changes, the overall page structure looks very similar. This can sometimes confuse search engines, making the later pages look like duplicates of Page 1.
Harder to Crawl: Pages deeper in the series might receive fewer internal links compared to Page 1. Search engine bots might have to click through several "Next Page" links to reach them, potentially making these deeper pages crawled less often.
Spreads Out Authority: If external websites link to specific pages within a paginated series (not just Page 1), the SEO value from those links gets spread across different pages instead of concentrating on a single main page.
SEO-Friendly Ways to Handle Pagination
Over the years, the best way to handle pagination for SEO has changed a bit. Google used to recommend using special tags called rel="next" and rel="prev" in the code to show the relationship between pages in a series. However, in 2019, Google announced they stopped using these tags for indexing purposes.
So, what's the best approach now? It focuses on making things clear through your linking and canonical tags:
Focus on Strong Internal Linking: This is the most important thing.
Make sure every page in the paginated series is linked to from the previous page (e.g., a "Previous" button).
Ensure Page 1 links to Page 2, Page 2 links to Page 3, and so on ("Next" buttons).
Consider adding links to all pages in the series from Page 1 if the number of pages is small.
Using rel="next" and rel="prev" in your code is still okay for helping browsers and accessibility tools, but don't rely on it for Google's indexing.
Use Canonical Tags Correctly: For most paginated series, the recommended approach is to use a self-referencing canonical tag on each page.
This means the canonical tag on Page 1 points to the URL of Page 1.
The canonical tag on Page 2 points to the URL of Page 2.
And so on for every page in the series. This tells search engines that each page in the series is the preferred version of the content found at that specific URL, preventing them from thinking pages are duplicates of Page 1. Avoid canonicalizing all paginated pages back to Page 1, as this tells Google to only index Page 1, and your content on pages 2+ might not appear in search.
Consider a "View All" Page (Sometimes): If your content can reasonably be shown on a single page without causing major loading speed issues (for example, a multi-page article that isn't extremely long, or a product list that isn't massive), you could create a "View All" page that combines all the content. In this case, the "View All" page would have a self-referencing canonical, and all the paginated pages would have a canonical tag pointing to the "View All" page. This consolidates all content and authority onto one URL, but it's not suitable for very long lists or articles that would make a single page slow to load.
Best Practices for Paginated Content
Make All Pages Crawlable: Ensure your robots.txt file does not block search engine bots from accessing any pages in your paginated series.
Make All Pages Indexable: Check that none of the pages in the series have a noindex meta robots tag if you want them to be indexed.
Use Clear Navigation Links: Make it easy for users to move between pages with clear "Next," "Previous," and page number links.
Handling pagination correctly helps search engines discover, understand, and index all the content spread across your series, ensuring your important pages don't get overlooked.
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