Pagination

Pagination is the practice of splitting a large set of content across a sequence of numbered pages, such as page 1, 2, 3 of a product listing or blog archive.

It exists to keep individual pages manageable for users and servers when a single category, search result, or feed holds more items than one page should carry. From a technical-SEO view, the challenge is making sure crawlers can move through the whole sequence and reach the deeper items, while search engines treat each paginated URL as a distinct page rather than a duplicate.

Google retired support for rel="next" and rel="prev" as an indexing signal in 2019, so those tags no longer guide pagination the way older guidance suggested. The current advice is simpler: give every page in a series a unique, self-referencing canonical, make sure each paginated URL has crawlable anchor links to the next pages, and do not canonicalize page 2 and beyond back to page 1, which would hide the deeper content from indexing.

Common mistakes include loading additional items only through JavaScript with no real link for crawlers to follow, canonicalizing every page to the first, or building infinite scroll without a paginated fallback. Each of these can leave deeper items effectively orphaned. Done well, pagination keeps a large catalog fully discoverable without creating duplicate-content problems.

Related: Orphan Pages, Crawl budget explained, Duplicate content guide