Any list that grows past a few dozen items gets paginated: blog archives, product categories, search results, forum threads. The first page shows items 1 to 24, page 2 shows 25 to 48, and so on, usually at URLs like /shop/coffee/page/2/ or /shop/coffee/?page=2.
Pagination is mostly a usability choice. The SEO question is how to make sure search engines can still reach every item, without filling the index with near-identical list pages.
Why it matters
Bean & Barrel Coffee has 140 products in its “Coffee” category, 24 per page. The products on pages 4, 5 and 6 are only linked from those deeper pages. If Google can’t follow the pagination links, or is told to ignore everything after page 1, those products lose their main path for discovery and internal link value.
How Google handles it now
Google announced in 2019 that it had stopped using rel="next" and rel="prev" as an indexing signal some time earlier. It treats each paginated page as a normal page. Current guidance:
- Link pages with normal
<a href>links so crawlers can follow them. Include links to the next page and ideally to a few numbered pages. - Give each page its own URL (a path or a
?page=parameter, not a#fragment). - Use a self-referencing canonical on every page. Page 2 should canonical to page 2, not to page 1.
- Don’t noindex paginated pages if they’re the only path to items deeper in the list.
<!-- On /shop/coffee/page/3/ -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/shop/coffee/page/3/" />A “View all” page is fine if it loads quickly, in which case you can canonical the series to it.
Infinite scroll and “Load more”
Lists that load more items as you scroll are common in WooCommerce themes. They’re fine for visitors, but Google doesn’t scroll or click buttons the way people do. Make sure there’s a crawlable paginated version behind the scenes, with each chunk at its own URL.
Common mistakes
- Canonicalizing all paginated pages to page 1, which tells Google to ignore the products listed further down (see canonical tag).
- Blocking
?page=parameters in robots.txt. - Combining pagination with sort and filter parameters, multiplying URLs and wasting crawl budget.
- Duplicate titles across the series. Adding “Page 2” to titles and descriptions keeps them distinct.
How to check
Crawl the site and confirm deep products are reachable within a reasonable number of clicks. RankThat’s Site Audit flags pages buried too deep in the site, canonicals pointing elsewhere and duplicate titles, which are the usual pagination symptoms.