Pagination is a web / SEO term used for a series of content which is divided into a list of several pages. For example, on ecommerce websites, category pages often use pagination to split a series of products into multiple pages.
On blogs, pagination is used when a list of articles spans multiple pages. Sometimes long articles also use pagination to divide the article into a series of several pages.
This article is a free translation of that of Lyli Ray SEO Director at Path Interactive in New York.In 2011, Google deployed and imposed rel = prev and rel = next tags as a way to manage paging for SEO. The pagination tags were intended to tell Google when the URLs were part of a multi-page series, which helped consolidate all of the indexing signals and links into one page in the series.
These tags helped search engines organize paged URLs and ensure that they were not treated as duplicates or light content. He also helped consolidate the whole value of backlinks to paginated URLs into one unit, so that the paginated series benefited as a whole from all the backlinks it received.
On March 21, 2019, Google reported that the paging tags (rel = prev and rel = next) had been fully deprecated. The announcement was made on Twitter and took a lot of SEO specialist by surprise, since the implementation of pagination tags was a well known best practice in SEO, and that several thousand hours and development resources had been invested in implementing these tags as a fundamental technical SEO strategy.
This left a lot of SEOs, UX professionals, and web developers wondering what to do ... At Seattle SMX Advanced, I walked through the different implementation options for paging and best practices and the pros and cons involved in each method. Here are the 3 implementation options that have all been confirmed by John Mueller of Google as current best practices for paging management for SEO :
Pagination method 1:
continue to use multi-page pagination with self-referenced canonical tags for each page in the series. Keep rel = prev and rel = next if you are already using it.
With this method, each URL in the paginated series is treated in the same way as any indexable page on your site: add a self-referenced canonical tag, and include anchor links (<a href>) at each series page as an internal link on the page.
For bonus points, add internal links to deeper pages in the series. For example, instead of including only the “Previous” and “Next” links, consider adding links to “1, 2, 3, 4… 10” as this will reduce the search depth of your paginated URLs and links they contain.
When using this implementation, it is important not to "noindex" or block paginated URLs using robots.txt. Also, avoid adding rel = canonical tags to deeper paginated URLs on the first page of the series. Search engines must be able to access each paginated URL in order to browse the links it contains. Preventing search engines from accessing URLs with any of the above methods will prevent them from crawling your old products, articles or other content contained in the paginated list, which can dramatically cut the PageRank of these pages and therefore affect their ranking.
If you have already implemented the rel = prev and rel = next tags, there is no need to remove them. Bing and other search engines still use tags, and they are used for web accessibility plus W3C compliance.
Pagination method 2:
use a "See All" page and channel any paginated or parameter URLs to the "See All" page.
With this implementation, a page should contain all the components of the paginated list, i.e. all the links to products or articles. Use this page as the canonical page "See all", which will serve as a single indexable page of the whole paginated series. All parameters added to this URL or to any resulting paginated URL must be canonized on the "See all" page.
The downside of this method is its potential impact on page performance. Listing dozens or dozens of products or items on a single page, especially if they contain thumbnails of images, can slow down page loading. Consider implementing lazy loading, hyperlinks, or AJAX-compatible faceted navigation to help improve performance and make it easier for users to navigate your content.
Pagination method 3:
Use a " View More " button or infinite scrolling in combination with the History API and anchor links to paginated URLs.
If you're using a "View More" button or infinite scrolling, be sure to include links to actual paginated URLs and don't rely on JavaScript events to load paginated components. Links to these paginated URLs must be written using an <a href> anchor link. Consider combining your endless scrolling experience with paginated URLs and page anchor links to gain UX and SEO benefits simultaneously. Here is a Codex example of what this implementation looks like in practice. The History API is often used to dynamically modify URLs as the user scrolls through URLs, but make sure that this method is used in conjunction with <a href> links to paginated URLs so that search engines can access paged URLs.