Pagination for SEO and How to Do It

We need page-by-page navigation for:

1. Speeding up page loading times. A page with several dozen elements will load much faster than a page with thousands of elements.
2. Making searching and viewing elements more comfortable. This will improve your site’s usability and conversion, thus making it more effective and profitable.

Seems easy enough. However, one of the most common technical mistakes in all new projects is when webmasters ignore SEO requirements for pagination, which in turn negatively affects sites’ positions in search results.

Let’s discuss what exactly paginated pages are, look over the most common examples, and learn how to paginate correctly.

The most common page-by-page navigation is page numbers with hyperlinks. It’s what we are used to seeing, and it can be suitable and user-friendly for most cases.

It is important to keep your interface clear and understandable:

• The current page should be highlighted, so the user can clearly see what page they are on.
• Don’t show all the links at once, only those closest to the current one. 10 is an optimal amount.
• Add “Back” and “Forward” type links to streamline sequential viewing.

New elements are loaded on the current page by clicking a button. This creates an endless scroll effect and boosts user engagement. That button also allows you to control the scroll.

You can forsake the button and load new elements automatically when a user reaches a certain position on a page.

From a user’s perspective—and taking into account mobile sites —this is the most convenient way. No need to click anything, just scroll until your fingers get tired.

An endless scroll is popular on social networks and news portals to hold user attention for as long as possible, but it’s not always convenient for sites that deal with goods.

When your users need to search alphabetically, it is convenient to use letters instead of numbers.

A convenient way to arrange page-by-page navigation is to combine several methods. For example, page numbers are handy for implementation and indexation, whereas “Show more” techniques provide a better conversion. These two methods can be used in tandem:

Optimizing pagination for online shops and other sites is extremely important. Why? Because incorrectly set up pages can lead to two grave “SEO sins” at once.

Duplicate pages are pretty common technical errors for sites. Search engines determine that a certain page is a duplicate by browser headers (title), meta-description tags (description), and sometimes by the content itself.

Users don’t need thousands of copies of the same page, and search engines commonly leave only one page in their results. And it’s not always the one you need: you could get your 51st page ranked instead of the 1st. Moreover, if your site contains a lot of duplicate pages, it means that you provide low-quality content.

How to check it:

Scan your site with a crawler program, such as the free version of Xenu, to find duplicate ‘title’ and ‘description’ attributes, and then review the list of problem pages. 

Each site’s crawl budget is limited, since even search engines aren’t powerful enough to scan the whole Internet every day. Here is an example of a trusted site with 3,700+ pages in the index. You can see that the average number of Google bots’ visits is about 1,100 per day. If your site is smaller or nothing links to it, then the number of visits will be even lower.

In case of incorrect pagination, a robot would ignore a large number of pages in your catalog; thus, it would not be able to scan items listed in them.

How to check it:

Go to Google Search Console — Index — Coverage.

Examine which pages made it to the index (Valid & Valid with warnings) and which were excluded from it (Excluded), along with reasons for exclusion. If you see that many of your listings aren’t in the search database, then you have serious problems with indexation.

Okay, so pagination is vital, and these pages are really important for your site. But how do you set up correct SEO pagination?

These URLs can be static or dynamic.

An example of a static URL:

https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/page-2/

An example of a dynamic URL:

https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog?page=2

The URL format is not critical; the choice usually depends on technical aspects and your CMS (content management system).

The first page is always the starting page of a catalog, so https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/ and https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/page-1/ will essentially be the same page—duplicates. It is important to check that your navigation block doesn’t have any links to the first page with the parameter. In any case, make sure to add a 301 redirect from https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/page-1/ to https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/.

There are several strategies for managing pagination, but, as of today, none of them can be safely called the best. Google says nothing on the topic, so webmasters try various things and look for custom solutions. So here we’re going to review all of these strategies and highlight their individual features.

This way is always possible. You can rely on “smart algorithms” and circumvent working on pagination at all, but the results in this case are unpredictable.

Some webmasters recommend hiding your pagination so that robots won’t waste their time crawling through unranked pages.There are two ways to do so:

1. By placing the meta tag <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow” /> in your paginated pages section.
2. By adding a corresponding command to the file robots.txt, which contains instructions for web crawlers.

We explained above why this approach is not advisable: it’ll create problems with indexing items and their search ranking. But it could be potentially useful for sites that have a huge number of paginated pages in their search index. That will give you at least some way to lower their number.

We also need to mention the second value of ‘content’ attribute — follow/nofollow. ‘nofollow’ tells a robot not to follow links on that page. Internal links should not be marked with ‘nofollow’ in any case. It’s good if a web crawler ignores these instructions, but this way the scanning process might get aborted, which will disrupt transferring internal link juice to other pages of your site.

With this method, you need to add a tag with the rel="canonical" attribute and set the first page as canonical, as below.

url: https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/?page=3

This method has several advantages:

• A web crawler would scan links on non-canonical pages, since their indexation is not forbidden, and so it might index items on them too.
• Paginated pages won’t make it into the index and won’t create any duplicates.
• They will not interfere with the ranking of main pages either.

If you use this method, then do SEO for paginated pages.

Google algorithms consider single-page content (the more listings you have on a page the better) to be optimal. Accordingly, since we’re making a page canonical for pagination, let it be the page with all listings.

For example, we can make a page with a ‘page-all’ parameter and create a “View all”–type link leading to it on all other pages of our catalog. We should also add a ‘canonical’ parameter with the ‘page-all’ page URL for paginated pages.

url: https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/

However, this method has several potential downsides:

• It won’t be easy to implement in some CMSs.
• The page with all listings can take a while to load, especially if you have too many items. Likewise, its quality may drop significantly if we try to speed up its loading time.

As an alternative, you can designate the first page of your catalog as a page with all listings, but this would negatively impact its load speed, which subsequently affects behavioral factors.

Finally, one more way of using ‘canonical’ is to set each paginated page as canonical for itself.

Essentially, this resembles the “do nothing’ method, but here we avoid the risk of creating duplicate paginated pages.

These tags were widely recommended until March of 2019, when Google’s leading analyst and search advocate John Mueller posted this tweet. The prev-next markup shows the connection between paginated pages.

For the first page, we specify the one that comes after it:

<link rel="next" href="https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/?page=2"> 

For the second page, we also enter the page that comes before it:

<link rel="prev" href="https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/>

<link rel="next" href="https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/?page=3">

For the last N-page, only the previous page has to be specified:

<link rel="prev" href=" https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/?page=(N-1)">

But, as it turned out, Google no longer uses this markup for collecting signals from pagination groups and hasn’t been doing so for several years already. And it didn’t affect the search in any way.

So, if your site has this type of markup, you don’t need to delete it: it doesn’t affect your website’s or your pagination ranking in any way. Besides, W3C recommends ‘prev-next’, and it is also used by other search engines and browsers.

The biggest problem of pagination is pages duplicating each other, which makes it difficult to choose a relevant page and hampers the ranking process.

How to avoid this problem with proper pagination set up:

You need to enter your own masks for ‘title’ in paginated pages to avoid repeating the header of your main page or duplicating each other’s headers.

E.g., this would be the first (main) page of a section:

url: https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/fishing-rods/
title:   
     Fishing rods — an online store for fishing 

Paginated page #2:

url: https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/fishing-rods/?page=2
title:   
     Fishing rods — an online store for fishing | Page 2 
or   
     Fishing rods — Page 2 

The short version is more convenient, and it will fit on a tab in full.

Meta-description, among other things, helps search engines understand the contents of a page. If several pages have the same description, then they must be roughly the same. And if you have many pages like this, then it looks like your site doesn’t have much informational value. That’s why all pages that a search engine can see and crawl through should have their own unique description.

You can uniqualize the contents of a meta-tag with the same ‘Page #’ variable.

E.g., the first (main) page of a section:

url: https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/fishing-rods/
description:
     Buy rods for fishing online. See the full catalog and prices on our site.
     223 fishing rods from global manufacturers in stock and on request. Nationwide shipping.  

Paginated page #2:

url: https://www.mysite-shop.com/catalog/fishing-rods/?page=2
description:   
     Buy rods for fishing online. See the full catalog and prices on our site — Page 2. 

Your optimized text should be posted only on the first page of a section, and it shouldn’t be repeated on paginated pages.

One more way to employ pagination in SEO is to use the pages as landings for queries that are similar in meaning but don’t “land” on a single page.

For example, you have a store that sells furniture for kids, and you can’t separate beds and cribs in your catalog — all of them are thrown a jumble in one section. Then you optimize the first page for the more frequent group “kid beds”, and the second one for “cribs”. ‘Title’, ‘description’, and texts should be set up separately for each page.

In practice, any actual decision regarding pagination is first and foremost determined by your technical capabilities and your management system. But whatever method you use for your site, make sure to go through our checklist.

✔️ Starting with the second one, each paginated page should have its own URL, whether a dynamic (/catalog/?page=2) or a static one (/catalog/page2/). Choose the type that is more optimal for you to implement.

✔️ Paginated pages that don’t have enough listings for them, such as page=100000000, should return 404.

✔️ The first page in a pagination line should lead to the main URL instead of page=1.

✔️ Paginated page #1 (/catalog/?page=1) should return response code 301, which leads to the main page of a section (/catalog/) instead of code 200.

✔️ The “title’ of each paginated page should differ from the ‘title’ of the first page. It is generated using a mask [Section header — page #], unless you decide on something else.

✔️ The ‘description’ of paginated pages is made by using a mask with “Section name” and “Page #” variables.

✔️ An h1 header is not critical for pagination. Depending on the circumstances, it can repeat the header from the section’s main page, or it can be generated using a mask “Page # Section name”.

✔️ If your section has some text content before or after a listing, then it should be present only on paginated pages in case it has some important user information, such as purchase or shipping terms.

✔️ When opening some listing from any place on any paginated page, if your user then returns to the catalog with the “Back” button in their browser, they should be returned to the exact same place that they were on, with the same selection filters applied.

✔️ If you implement sorting by price, name, and other sorting features, the sorted selection should retain its order of elements when switching to another page.

✔️ If you have a sorting option (by name, price, etc.), then it should work on all paginated pages. In addition, if your visitor wasn’t on the first page when they used sorting, then they should be redirected to the first, while the chosen sorting parameters should be added to page URL.