Pagination is an essential feature for managing large volumes of content across websites, from blogs to ecommerce platforms.
Unfortunately, you might come across some SEO pagination issues which are quite common. Issues caused by pagination include duplicate content issues, inefficient crawling, and poor user experience.
If one understands these usual problems and applies simple solutions, both search engine visibility and user engagement will be improved.
This is especially true now that Google has indicated that it will no longer use the rel=prev/rel=next attributes to manage paginated sites, which were formerly the best approach to optimize pagination for SEO.
Source: Google Search Console’s X Handle
Instead of using rel=prev/rel=next to identify the relationship between paginated pages as a series, Google now treats each paginated page as a standalone page.
The effects of SEO are numerous, but the most essential point is that you should consider best practices for on-page optimization while designing your website’s pagination.
This easy guide will educate you about the common SEO pagination issues and ways in which you can easily fix them. Let’s begin:
A. What is a Pagination in SEO?
Pagination is a web design strategy that divides long content into many pages to make it comfortable for visitors to navigate and explore the information.
The most popular uses for pagination on websites are ecommerce category pages, a list of material on news sites or blogs, and splitting forum threads.
The Google SERP is also paginated, making it easy to browse the content (Though the new update brings more continued scrolling).
That is why the text is paginated in the first place. The separation into distinct pages gives users a clear hierarchy of the page and indicates the conclusion of their search.
However, pagination isn’t the only way webmasters try to manage lengthy information. Many people opt to use endless scroll instead.
B. Pagination vs Infinite Scroll
Pagination is the exact opposite of infinite scroll.
Rather than being spread out over several pages, long portions are included on a single page that readers can scroll through continuously to view all of the content.
Sometimes, there is a “load more” button that separates sections of infinite scroll pages. It still counts as one page even when clicking brings up the following group of content.
Both choices are categorized as endless scrolls and are viewed as such by search engines.
Infinite scroll is used by many websites because it looks good, makes for a more visually pleasing browsing experience, and greatly improves the mobile user experience.
Unfortunately, from an SEO standpoint, the option is not optimal, even though it may be beneficial for users.
To begin with, Googlebot is unable to simulate scrolling. It is also unable to press the “load more” button. Because of this, search engines require assistance in order to efficiently crawl and index every piece of material on an infinite scroll page.
In the same way, crawlers won’t waste their crawling budget on visiting an infinite scroll page. Instead, they might grab a snapshot of it. However, this kind of snapshot would only include a portion of the content—more than what we see on the screen.
Therefore, if you use infinite scroll, you’re losing out on a huge chance to have every piece of content indexed.
However, pagination does not cause you to encounter these issues. Crawlers handle paginated pages in the same way as any other material; that is, they regard each one as a distinct object.
C. Common SEO Pagination Issues
There are numerous potential issues that can occur as a result of poor pagination handling, but not necessarily due to the pagination component.
Google is intelligent enough to grasp the relationship between pages, whether they have rel=next/prev properties or not.
So, in most circumstances, it should be OK as long as your user experience is at the center of your pagination design.
That being stated, let’s look at some of the most common concerns and myths to ensure that search engines can find and index our content appropriately.
1. You’re Doing it Too Much
People seem to enjoy using fancy tags on their websites for whatever reason.
It’s possible that they are simply using coders who DJ at night, or they could just be bored, but whatever, there are always too many people implementing too many things that end up at odds with one another.
2. Crawl budget
Most websites don’t have to worry about the crawl budget.
You probably won’t have major crawl budget problems unless your website is updated often or contains millions of pages, like a news publisher or job listing site.
Optimizing to decrease crawling to paginated URLs may be taken into consideration if the crawl budget is an issue, but this won’t be the standard.
So, what is the most effective method? In general, having your paginated information crawled and indexed is preferable to not having it.
This is so that Google is deterred from accessing the links contained in paginated URLs if we prevent Google from crawling and indexing those URLs.
Because of this, URLs on those deeper paginated pages—whether they be for blog posts or products—may become more difficult for crawlers to access and may even be deindexed.
After all, internal linking is a vital part of search engine optimization and helps both users and search engines find our material.
3. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is not an issue with pagination because paginated pages will have material different from the previous pages in the sequence.
For example, page two will feature a different assortment of products or blogs than page one.
If you have some material on your category page, we recommend keeping it on the first page and deleting it from later pages in the sequence. This will signal the page we want to prioritize to crawlers.
Don’t worry about redundant meta descriptions on paginated sites; meta descriptions are not a ranking indication, and Google often rewrites them anyhow.
D. How to Fix Pagination Issues
1. Make Anchor Links Crawlable
To enable Google to discover, crawl, and index paginated pages, these pages must be accessible. It’s crucial to ensure that your website includes links to paginated pages that are crawlable. These links should have the href attribute and an anchor link.
For instance, a crawlable link to a paginated page should be structured like this:
- <a href=”https://mydomain.com/catalog/products?page=3″>
On the flip side, these types of links would not be crawlable by search engines:
- <span href=”https://mydomain.com/category/products?page=3″>
- <a onclick=”goto(‘mydomain.com/category/products?page=3’)”>
Ensuring that your links follow the proper format makes it more manageable for search engines to navigate through your site’s paginated content.
2. Do not Include Paginated Pages in Sitemaps
This prevents the search engine from crawling and indexing certain pages, wasting its crawl budget. You’ll also avoid having Google rank a random paginated page.
Which will definitely help you in the long run.
3. Optimize Meta Tags, If Possible
Remember John Mueller’s comment regarding paginated pages:
“We don’t treat pagination differently. We treat them as normal pages.”?
Google now treats them as regular pages. This means that it will look at the basic on-page SEO for each page. As a result, page titles and meta descriptions should always be optimized in the same way that any other page would be.
For example, to make a page title unique, put a number to it. This manner, Google will recognize each paginated title as distinct.
Also, only add SEO information to the pagination’s root page. Adding the identical material to all paginated pages, a common error, would result in a duplicate content issue.
E. Summarizing Common SEO Pagination Issues And How To Easily Fix Them
SEO-friendly paginations are all about providing the best user experience to your users, not complicated implementations or solutions.
Although we discussed deoptimizing your paginated pages, this was primarily in terms of SEO material like as meta descriptions and meta titles, not by adding any further optimizations such as FAQs to these pages.
However, these are still distinct sites that must be optimized for user experience. You must assist these pages in achieving their purpose of facilitating user access to information on your website.
A few things to mind when developing these pages are:
- Mobile friendliness.
- Page speed and UX design
- Page layout Filters
If you focus on these guidelines, your pagination will assist your website and your SEO efforts.
Suggested read: Topic Clusters for Maximum Impact: The Anatomy of Modern SEO
F. Common FAQs on Common SEO Pagination Issues And How To Easily Fix Them
Should I use pagination or endless scrolling for SEO?
Pagination is often preferable for SEO since search engines can readily index each page. Infinite scroll is more difficult for them to understand because they cannot replicate scrolling like humans. If you use infinite scroll, you may miss out on having all of your material indexed.
Is Google still using rel=prev/rel=next for pagination?
No, Google no longer uses rel=prev/rel=next to comprehend pagination. Now, each paginated page is handled as a separate page. This implies you should prioritize making each page distinctive and SEO-friendly.
How can I use pagination to prevent duplicate content?
Make sure every paginated page contains original material to avoid duplication content. Make sure to vary the titles and meta descriptions for every page if you’re using the same material on more than one.
