SEO-Friendly Pagination: A Complete Best Practices Guide. Site pagination is a wily shapeshifter. It’s used in contexts ranging from displaying items on category pages, to article archives, to gallery slideshows and forum threads.

For SEO professionals, it isn’t a question of if you’ll have to deal with pagination, it’s a question of when.

At a certain point of growth, websites need to split content across a series of component pages for user experience (UX).

Our job is to help search engines crawl and understand the relationship between these URLs so they index the most relevant page.

Over time, the SEO best practices of pagination handling have evolved. Along the way, many myths have presented themselves as facts. But no longer.

This article will:

• Debunk the myths around how pagination hurts SEO.
• Present the optimal way to manage pagination.
• Review misunderstood or subpar methods of pagination handling.
• Investigate how to track the KPI impact of pagination.

How Pagination Can Hurt SEO

You’ve probably read that pagination is bad for SEO.

However, in most cases, this is due to a lack of correct pagination handling, rather than the existence of pagination itself.

Let’s look at the supposed evils of pagination and how to overcome the SEO issues it could cause.

Pagination Causes Duplicate Content

Correct if pagination has been improperly implemented, such as having both a “View All” page and paginated pages without a correct rel=canonical or if you have created a page=1 in addition to your root page.

Incorrect when you have SEO friendly pagination. Even if your H1 and meta tags are the same, the actual page content differs. So it’s not duplication.

Pagination Creates Thin Content

Correct if you have split an article or photo gallery across multiple pages (in order to drive ad revenue by increasing pageviews), leaving too little content on each page.

Incorrect when you put the desires of the user to easily consume your content above that of banner ad revenues or artificially inflated pageviews. Put a UX-friendly amount of content on each page.

Pagination Dilutes Ranking Signals

Correct. Pagination causes internal link equity and other ranking signals, such as backlinks and social shares, to be split across pages.

But can be minimized by using pagination only in cases where a single-page content approach would cause poor user experience (for example, ecommerce category pages). And on such pages, adding as many items as possible, without slowing down the page to a noticeable level, to reduce the number of paginated pages.

Pagination Uses Crawl Budget

Correct if you’re allowing Google to crawl paginated pages. And there are some instances where you would want to use that budget.

For example, for Googlebot to travel through paginated URLs to reach deeper content pages.

Often incorrect when you set Google Search Console pagination parameter handling to “Do not crawl” or set a robots.txt disallow, in the case where you wish to conserve your crawl budget for more important pages.

Managing Pagination According to SEO Best Practices

Use Crawlable Anchor Links

For search engines to efficiently crawl paginated pages, the site must have anchor links with href attributes to these paginated URLs.

Be sure your site uses <a href=”your-paginated-url-here”> for internal linking to paginated pages. Don’t loaded paginated anchor links or href attribute via JavaScript.

Additionally, you should indicate the relationship between component URLs in a paginated series with rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes.

Yes, even after Google’s infamous Tweet that they no longer use these link attributes at all.

Shortly afterward, Ilya Grigorik clarified that rel=“next” / ”prev” can still be valuable.

Google is not the only search engine in town. Here is Bing’s take on the issue.

Complement the rel=”next” / “prev” with a self-referencing rel=”canonical” link. So /category?page=4 should rel=”canonical” to /category?page=4.

This is appropriate as pagination changes the page content and so is the master copy of that page.

If the URL has additional parameters, include these in the rel=”prev” / “next” links, but don’t include them in the rel=”canonical”.

For example:

<link rel="next" href="https://www.example.com/category?page=2&order=newest" />

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/category?page=2" />

Doing so will indicate a clear relationship between the pages and prevent the potential of duplicate content.

Common errors to avoid:

• Placing the link attributes in the <body> content. They’re only supported by search engines within the <head> section of your HTML.
• Adding a rel=”prev” link to the first page (a.k.a. the root page) in the series or a rel=”next” link to the last. For all other pages in the chain, both link attributes should be present.
• Beware of your root page canonical URL. Chances are on ?page=2, rel=prev should link to the canonical, not a ?page=1.

Read more: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/technical-seo/pagination/#close