Pagination and SEO: What you need to know in 2027

Certain types of content, such as ecommerce products or articles, can go missing from Google’s search results. Failing to adhere to Google’s pagination guidelines is often the reason for this.

Pagination gives search engines pathways to discover content beyond the first page of a listing, archive, or discussion. But how those pathways are implemented matters. 

Poorly handled pagination can make deeper content harder for search engines to find, while overly aggressive canonicalization can prevent potentially valuable paginated URLs from appearing in search results.

What is pagination?

Pagination is the function on websites that allows content to be divided across multiple pages while remaining thematically connected and navigable through page numbers or “Next” and “Previous” buttons.

When a single page contains too much content to load efficiently, pagination breaks it into smaller sections.

Pagination improves user experience and prevents the client (i.e., web browser) from loading too much information — much of which likely won’t even be reviewed by the user.

Examples of pagination in action

Product listings

One common example of pagination is the multiple pages of product results within a single product feed or category on a website.

Virgin Experience Days, a site that sells gift experiences in the vein of red-letter days, includes some strong examples of this.

Take their spa and beauty experiences page. The “All Spa & Beauty Pamper Days Experiences” section alone includes 936 experiences to choose from. That’s a lot.

Clearly, listing all 936 on a single page wouldn’t be practical. Doing so would result in excessive vertical scrolling and could greatly slow page loading times. However, you’ll find pagination links further down:

Clicking a pagination link moves users to additional pages of product listings, such as page two:

• https://www.virginexperiencedays.co.uk/spa-and-beauty?page=2

In the URL, ?page=2 appears as a parameter extension, a common pagination syntax.

Variations include ?p=2 or /page/2/, but the purpose remains the same: allowing users to browse additional pages of listings.

Even major retailers like Amazon and eBay use similar pagination structures.

Pagination also helps search engines discover deeply nested products. If a site is so large that all of its products can’t be listed in a single XML sitemap, pagination links provide an additional way for crawlers to access them.

Even when XML sitemaps are in place, internal linking is critically important for SEO. While pagination links aren’t the strongest ranking signal, they serve a foundational role in ensuring that content is discoverable.

Dig deeper: Internal linking for ecommerce: The ultimate guide

Blog and news feeds

Pagination isn’t limited to product listings. It’s also widely used in blog and news feeds.

Take Search Engine Land’s SEO article archive. On this page, you can access a feed of all SEO-related articles on Search Engine Land.

Scrolling down, you’ll find pagination links. Clicking “2” takes you to the next set of SEO articles.

Pagination inside content

Pagination can also exist within individual pieces of content rather than at a feed level. For example, some news websites paginate comment sections when a single article receives thousands of comments.

Similarly, forum threads with extensive discussions often use pagination to break up replies across multiple pages.

Consider this post from WPBeginner. Scrolling to the bottom, you’ll see that even the comment section uses pagination to organize user responses.

Why is pagination important for SEO?

Pagination plays a crucial role in SEO for several reasons:

Indexing

Without pagination, search engine crawlers may struggle to find deeply nested content, such as articles, news articles, products, and comments.

Crawl efficiency

Pagination increases the number of URLs on a site, which might seem counterproductive to efficient crawling. However, most search engines recognize common pagination structures — even without rich markup.

This understanding allows them to prioritize crawling more valuable content while ignoring less important paginated pages.

Internal linking

Pagination also contributes to internal linking. While pagination links don’t carry significant link authority, they provide structure and lateral content discovery.

Google tends to pay less attention to orphaned pages, or those without inbound links, and pagination can provide a connection that prevents your content from getting siloed off from the rest of the site.

Managing content duplication

If URLs aren’t properly structured, search engines may mistakenly identify them as duplicate content.

Pagination isn’t as strong a signal for content consolidation as redirects or canonical tags, but when implemented correctly, it helps search engines differentiate between paginated pages and true duplicates.

Google’s deprecation of rel=prev/next

Google previously supported rel=prev/next for declaring paginated content. However, in March 2019, Google revealed it hadn’t used this markup for some time. As a result, these tags are no longer necessary.

Google likely used rel=prev/next to study common pagination structures. Over time, those insights were integrated into its core algorithms, making the markup redundant.

Some SEOs believe these tags still help with crawling, but there’s little evidence to support this position. Don’t worry if your site doesn’t use this markup, as Google can still recognize paginated URLs.

If your site uses the markup, there’s also no urgent need to remove it, as it won’t negatively impact your SEO.

Google’s pagination documentation update

Google has recently strengthened its implementation documentation, tweaking it and adding new information here and there. Unfortunately, it hasn’t thoroughly documented its own documentation changes. Such records do exist, but often omit important information.

Recently, likely within the last six months, Google updated its pagination documentation and consolidated many pieces of pagination-related documentation. The update particularly revolved around how canonical tags and pagination interface with one another.

Google stresses that each paginated URL should use a self-referencing canonical tag. This is something that most technical SEO experts have known for years now.

As far back as 2015, it was common for SEOs to canonicalize paginated URLs to the first page of content to alleviate content duplication. This was an overzealous attempt to control theoretical content duplication penalties and content indexing.

In reality, if Google doesn’t find a URL useful, it simply ignores it. It’s also possible that some comments or paginated product listing URLs may be useful to Google. Enforcing canonicals that point users back to the first page of results nullifies these additional ranking opportunities. The only thing that aggressive pagination canonicalization can actually achieve is a diminished ranking footprint.

The guidance from Google is clear:

• “Don’t use the first page of a paginated sequence as the canonical page. Instead, give each page its own canonical URL.”

Let Google choose which version of each page to serve. Search results are highly dynamic and intent-driven. Reducing your site’s potential ranking footprint for ease of analysis will only lead to worse results.

Why pagination is still important: The infinite scroll debate

Alternate methods for browsing large amounts of content have emerged over the past couple of decades.

“View more” or “Load more” buttons often appear under comment streams, while infinite scroll or lazy-loaded feeds are common for both articles and products.

Some argue that these features are more user-friendly. Originally pioneered by social networks such as Twitter, this form of navigation helped boost social interactions.

Some websites have adopted it, but why isn’t it more widespread? From an SEO perspective, the issue is that search engine crawlers interact with webpages in a limited way.

While headless browsers may sometimes execute JavaScript-based content during a page load, search crawlers typically don’t “scroll down” to trigger new content. In any event, a search engine bot certainly won’t scroll indefinitely to load everything.

As a result, websites relying solely on infinite scroll or lazy loading risk orphaning articles, products, and comments over time.

For major news brands with strong SEO authority and extensive XML sitemaps, this may not be a concern. The trade-off between SEO and user experience may be acceptable.

But for most websites, implementing these technologies is likely a bad idea. Search crawlers may not scroll through content feeds, but they will click hyperlinks — including pagination links.

How JavaScript can interfere with pagination

Even if your site doesn’t use infinite scroll plugins, JavaScript can still interfere with pagination.

Since July 2024, Google has at least attempted to render JavaScript for all visited pages. However, details on this process remain vague:

• Does Google render all pages, including JavaScript, at the time of crawl?
• Or is execution deferred to a separate processing queue?
• How does this affect Google’s ranking algorithms?
• Does Google make initial determinations before executing JavaScript weeks later?

There are no definitive answers to these questions.

What we do know is that “dynamic rendering is on the decline,” according to the 2024 Web Almanac SEO Chapter.

If Google’s effort to execute JavaScript for all crawled pages is progressing well (which seems unlikely given the potential efficiency drawbacks), why are so many sites reverting to a non-dynamic state?

This doesn’t mean JavaScript use is disappearing, however. Instead, more sites may be shifting to server-side or edge-side rendering.

If your site uses traditional pagination but JavaScript interferes with pagination links, it can still lead to crawl issues.

For example, your site might use traditional pagination links, but the main content of your page is lazy-loaded.

In turn, the pagination links only appear when a user (or bot) scrolls the page.

Dig deeper: A guide to diagnosing common JavaScript SEO issues

How to handle indexing and canonical tags for paginated URLs

Earlier, we commented on recent Google documentation updates. The findings within this section are largely similar but worth reinforcing.

SEO professionals often recommend using canonical tags to point paginated URLs to their parent pages, marking them as non-canonical. This practice was especially common before Google introduced rel=prev/next.

However, Google has since deprecated rel=prev/next, leaving many SEOs uncertain about the best way to handle pagination URLs.

How your website should be handling pagination URLs

Avoid blocking paginated content via robots.txt or with canonical tags, as doing so prevents Google from crawling or indexing those pages.

In the case of news articles, certain comment exchanges might be valuable to Google, potentially connecting a paginated version of an article with keywords that wouldn’t otherwise be associated with it.

This can generate free traffic, which is certainly something worth keeping.

Similarly, restricting the crawling and indexing of paginated product feeds could leave some products effectively soft-orphaned.

In SEO, there’s a tendency to chase perfection and aim for complete crawl control. But an overly aggressive crawl strategy can do more harm than good, so tread carefully.

There are cases where it makes sense to de-canonicalize or limit the crawling of paginated URLs, but before you take that step, make sure you have data showing that crawl-efficiency issues outweigh the potential free traffic gains.

In the end, the rule is simple: If you don’t have convincing data, don’t block the URLs.