Pagination
Pagination is the practice of splitting a long list of items, such as products, blog posts or search results, across several pages: page 1, page 2, page 3 and so on. It keeps pages fast and manageable, but it needs careful handling so search engines can still discover every item.
Why pagination matters for SEO
Products on page 7 of a category, or older blog posts on page 12 of an archive, may only be reachable through those paginated pages. If search engines cannot crawl them, the items deep in the list may be crawled rarely or missed altogether. Pagination also creates many similar-looking URLs that need the right signals.
How Google handles pagination
Google used to support rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags but announced in 2019 that it no longer uses them. Today Google treats each paginated page as a normal page. It discovers later pages by following ordinary links, and it may index them if they offer value.
Pagination best practices
- Give each page a unique, crawlable URL, such as /category/page/2/ or ?page=2.
- Link between pages with normal anchor links, not JavaScript-only buttons.
- Use self-referencing canonical tags on each paginated page. Do not canonicalise page 2, 3 and 4 to page 1, because that tells Google to ignore the items on them.
- Do not noindex paginated pages by default; Google may eventually stop following their links.
- Keep the first page strongest: put your main content, introduction and best items on page 1, and make sure internal links point to the first page.
- Avoid duplicate titles: adding “Page 2” to titles and descriptions helps distinguish them.
- Include enough items per page to reduce the number of pages, while keeping Page Speed good.
- Link to deep pages where useful, for example with numbered page links rather than only “next”.
Infinite scroll and “load more”
Infinite scroll and “load more” buttons load additional items with JavaScript. Search engines do not scroll or click, so items that appear only after these actions may never be seen. The solution is to back infinite scroll with paginated URLs: each batch of items should also exist at its own URL that can be reached through normal links. Update the URL in the address bar as users scroll. See JavaScript SEO for more.
View-all pages
A single page showing every item can be a good alternative for small to medium lists, as long as it loads quickly. In that case, paginated pages can canonicalise to the view-all page. For large lists, a view-all page is usually too slow.
Pagination vs faceted navigation
Pagination splits one list into pages. Faceted navigation filters the list by attributes such as colour or price. Combining the two can create enormous numbers of URLs, so decide which filtered views deserve to be indexed and keep the rest out of the crawl.
Pagination on category pages
On ecommerce sites, the first page of a category is usually the one you want to rank. Add helpful introductory content there, link to important subcategories and make sure products deeper in the list are also linked from elsewhere, such as related products or subcategories. See Category Page SEO.
Further reading: Google on pagination and incremental loading.
Key Takeaways
- Pagination splits long lists across numbered pages.
- Give each page a unique, crawlable URL with normal links.
- Use self-referencing canonicals on paginated pages.
- Back infinite scroll with paginated URLs.
- Make page one the strongest version of the list.
Related Terms
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