Pagination SEO | Best Practices

Pagination is a crucial aspect of managing large amounts of content, particularly for eCommerce websites, blogs, or content-heavy websites and platforms. Properly implementing pagination can significantly affect your search engine rankings and user experience. If not done properly you can cause many issues ranging from UX and user engagement issues to an impact on your crawl budget, ranking potential, and even duplicate content issues. This guide will walk you through various SEO pagination best practices, explain what pagination is, and provide alternatives to traditional pagination methods to ensure your site performs well regardless of which method you choose.

What Is Pagination In SEO?

Pagination refers to the process of dividing content across multiple pages. This is typically seen in eCommerce websites, blogs, or article archives where a single page cannot contain all items or posts. In the context of SEO, pagination in SEO refers to the strategies used to ensure these paginated pages are crawled, indexed, and ranked efficiently by search engines. Proper pagination tags, such as rel="next" and rel="prev", help search engines understand how your pages are linked and avoid issues like duplicate content.

Is Pagination Good or Bad For SEO?

The impact of pagination on SEO can vary depending on how it is implemented. When done correctly, it improves user experience and makes navigation easier for users and search engines. However, canonical issues, crawl inefficiencies, and duplicate content can hinder performance if not handled properly. By utilizing the more technical aspects of SEO you can mitigate any negatives associated with pagination. Below, we explore the risks of pagination and how to mitigate them.

The Risks of Pagination

Poor Crawl Efficiency

Improperly implemented paginated content leads to inefficient crawling. Search engines waste crawl budget on deeper paginated pages, especially if the URL structure is not set up correctly, or there are many internal links between each paginated page.

Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content across paginated pages can confuse search engines and lead to indexing issues. Implementing canonical pagination using self-referencing canonical tags is critical to mitigate this risk.

Poor UX

Poorly-implemented pagination can lead to poor user experience, especially if users cannot find content quickly. Most users will not spend the time navigating to page 27 of your paginated pages. To avoid this, use clear navigation and ensure that important content is loaded on the first page. Additionally, ensure your paginated content is organized logically and is mobile-friendly.

Indexation Issues

Deeper paginated pages may not get indexed properly, particularly if Google’s crawl budget is exhausted on less important pages. Optimizing your pagination canonical structure can help ensure that all important pages are indexed.

Canonicalization Problems

Improper use of canonical pagination tags can lead to indexing the wrong paginated pages or even duplicated content. Ensure you implement self-referencing canonicals or canonicalize the "View All" version of your content.

Interaction With Structured Data

When dealing with paginated pages, one of the risks often overlooked is the potential impact on structured data. Structured data helps search engines understand the content on your pages better, and improper implementation with paginated content can lead to errors in how this data is interpreted.

For example, eCommerce sites frequently use structured data to markup product information, and if this data is not correctly applied across paginated pages, it can cause confusion for search engines. Pagination issues may arise if structured data elements like product details or reviews are only partially available or are duplicated across multiple paginated pages.

Structured data needs to be consistent across all paginated pages. Failure to maintain consistent structured data information across paginated pages may result in Google failing to display rich results like product reviews, breadcrumbs, or even product availability in the search results.

How Do You Implement Pagination For SEO?

Properly implementing SEO-friendly pagination involves several best practices to ensure both users and search engines can easily navigate your site. Below are SEO pagination best practices to follow:

Pagination Best Practices

Rel Next & Rel Prev Tags

Use pagination tags like rel="next" and rel="prev" to signal the relationship between paginated pages to search engines. Though Google has stated they no longer use “rel=next” or “rel=prev” tags for indexing, it is still considered best practice for other search engines. In addition, by providing this additional information to Google, their crawlers will still utilize this additional information - even if it is no longer required for rankings.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Use canonical pagination tags to prevent duplicate content issues. By ensuring proper structured data, and proper canonical tags (which are talked about more in the next section) you’ll help ensure you avoid getting flagged with duplicate content.

Self-Referencing Canonical Tags

Each paginated page should have a self-referencing canonical tag to ensure that search engines index the correct version of the page and understand that these are part of a paginated series.

Optimize UX

Optimizing the user experience (UX) for pagination means that you ensure users can easily move between pages, particularly on mobile devices, and that specific content isn’t hard to find. SEO-friendly pagination also means faster load times, clear navigation, and improved accessibility for paginated content. We’ll discuss other methods to improve user experience later in this article as well. But these are some great places to start in terms of optimizing the user experience of your website, whether it is an eCommerce website, a blog, or anything else.

Limit Pagination Links

Avoid overwhelming users and search engines with too many pagination links. Stick to a smaller number of visible page links (e.g., "1, 2, 3, Next") to improve UX and ensure efficient crawling.

Alternatives To Pagination

If pagination SEO is causing issues with crawl budget or user engagement, you can consider some alternatives:

Infinite Scroll

Infinite scroll dynamically loads content as the user scrolls down the page. While it improves user engagement and removes the need for paginated pages, be sure to implement proper SEO techniques to ensure search engines can still crawl and index content.

"Load More" Button

A "Load More" button is a great alternative to pagination, offering users control over content loading without overwhelming them. This method can improve user engagement while maintaining a balance between pagination and infinite scroll. If you have a lot of content, however, load more buttons shouldn’t be the only method used, as users will be unlikely to see content further down the list.

Tabbed Navigation

Tabbed navigation organizes content into logical sections or categories, reducing the need for excessive pagination. This can enhance UX pagination and help users find content more quickly. Typically load more buttons are used in tandem with tabbed navigation because users are able to find the specific type of content they want.

Pagination Versus Infinite Scrolling

Choosing between pagination and infinite scrolling depends on your content structure and user experience goals. Infinite scroll is ideal for image-heavy content or social feeds, while pagination works better for eCommerce sites where users need to make specific selections. Each has its pros and cons. Ensure SEO-friendly pagination or infinite scroll techniques are applied based on the nature of your content. However, these aren’t hard and fast rules and can be customized however you need or want.

Trouble Shooting Pagination Issues

Even with best practices, issues may still arise. Below are common tools and methods to troubleshoot and resolve pagination issues if they do arise:

Google Search Console

Use Google Search Console to check for indexation issues and see how Google is crawling your paginated content. Utilizing this tool, you’ll be able to see what - if any - indexation issues are occurring, on which pages, and - in most cases - for which reasons.

Resolving Indexation Issues

If you find that certain pages are experiencing indexation issues, you can easily utilize the search console’s diverse toolset to diagnose and resolve any indexation-related issues you see.

Evaluating Implementation of Pagination

Track how Google is interpreting your SEO pagination URL structure to ensure there are no crawl inefficiencies or duplicate content problems. If you notice paginated pages aren’t getting indexed, use the search console to determine which pages, and why. When you implement proper pagination, you’ll be able to do routine checks to ensure that each page is getting indexed properly.

Google Analytics

Measure user engagement on paginated pages to assess whether users are interacting with your content or not. If you see that users are interacting with the first page in your pagination series, but they aren’t going further - chances are your user experience can be improved. However, this assumes your website, your content, and your first page receive regular traffic. If none of your content receives much or any traffic, you cannot really determine anything based on this information alone.

Determining User Engagement of Paginated Pages

Track bounce rates, exit rates, and session duration to gauge user interaction with paginated content and adjust your pagination UX accordingly. If most users bounce on the first page of your series it tells you there are some improvements that can be made to either the content itself or the experience. If you find that users interact with the first page, but never really the other pages in your pagination series, chances are your UX needs to be improved. Infinite scrolling might need to be utilized instead.

Ahrefs

Use Ahrefs to check the health of your paginated pages and review any issues related to duplicate content or indexing.

Utilize Information Provided In Reports

With Ahrefs or other SEO tools, you’re easily able to see issues like duplicate content a lot easier. Google’s search console is slightly more detailed and difficult to understand and use as a beginner. But, if you are using tools like Ahrefs, you will be told directly what issues you have, and how to fix them.