What is pagination?
Pagination is the practice of splitting long lists of content — blog archives, product listings, forum threads — into numbered pages (page 2, 3, and so on). It improves loading time and navigation for very long collections.
Why pagination matters for SEO
Pagination can create duplicate content (same listing repeated across pages), waste crawl budget and dilute signals if handled poorly. Historically SEOs used rel=”next”/”prev”, which Google deprecated — the modern approach is to treat paginated pages as normal pages with clear internal links.
Pagination best practices
- Use canonical tags pointing each page to itself.
- Add self-referencing canonicals on every paginated URL.
- Link paginated pages with proper anchor text.
- Ensure every page has unique, indexable content where valuable.
- Consider load-more or infinite scroll with unique URLs.
Related terms
How Social SEO Team can help
We clean up pagination and indexation issues. See our technical SEO services.