Pagination
Pagination is the practice of splitting a long content list across multiple pages — blog archives like /blog?page=2, e-commerce category pages like /products?p=3. It improves usability but, if mishandled, creates indexing and duplicate-content problems. It's a recurring topic in technical SEO.
Pagination is the practice of splitting a long content list across multiple pages — blog archives like /blog?page=2, e-commerce category pages like /products?p=3. It improves usability but, if mishandled, creates indexing and duplicate-content problems. It's a recurring topic in technical SEO.
Why It Matters
Pagination is one of Google's main paths for crawling content. If 100 blog posts sit behind a 20-page archive, Googlebot follows each page to discover post URLs. Broken pagination leads to old posts never getting indexed, or duplicate titles and descriptions across pages. Since Google officially dropped support for rel="prev"/rel="next" in 2019, pagination has become a must-know topic for blog owners.
Common Pitfalls
Thin content: Pages that only list post summaries without unique content can be flagged as low quality.
Duplicate meta tags: If every page reuses the same <title> and <meta description>, you send duplicate-content signals. Page 1 and Page 2 of /blog should not share titles.
Deep pagination: Beyond 20–30 pages, you hit crawl budget issues and orphan pages. Googlebot reaches later pages less and less.
JavaScript dependency: Scroll-based infinite scroll that relies only on JS can leave Googlebot unable to see the full list.
Wrong canonical: Canonicalizing every page to page 1 tells Google not to index anything beyond page 1 — the most common mistake.
Google's Recommended Approach
Self-canonical on every page: /blog?page=2 should canonical to /blog?page=2. Don't collapse to page 1.
Unique meta tags: Add "Page 2" to <title> and <meta description> to avoid duplication — e.g., "Blog - Page 2 | inblog."
Show everything on one page when possible: With 30–50 posts or fewer, a single "View All" page is the safest SEO choice.
Server-side rendering: Even with infinite scroll, render all pagination URLs server-side. Content loaded only via JS may not be indexed.
Include pagination URLs in the sitemap: XML sitemaps with /blog?page=1, /blog?page=2, etc., improve crawl efficiency.
Reduce depth via internal links: Use category, tag, and filter links so deep pages are reachable in 3–4 clicks.
The rel="prev" / rel="next" Era Is Over
In March 2019, Google officially announced that it had long since stopped using rel="prev"/rel="next" hints. Existing sites using these tags don't need to remove them, but there's no reason to implement them in new builds.
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