Key Takeaways
- Pagination splits large collections across linked pages so users and search engines can reach the full set without loading everything at once.
- Good pagination improves crawl paths, content discovery and page load performance.
- Use pagination for large blog archives, ecommerce product listings and other collections that span multiple pages.
- Keep every paginated URL crawlable and linked in a clear sequence. Each page should normally use a self-referencing canonical rather than point back to page one.
A Brief History of Pagination
Google no longer uses rel="next" and rel="prev" to identify paginated sequences. Pagination itself still helps users browse long collections. For discovery, provide crawlable links between pages.
Is Pagination Good for SEO?
The SEO benefits of pagination include:
- Improved User Experience (UX) through segmentation of content. This reduces load times, and avoids overwhelming users with long pages.
- Pagination enables search engine bots to discover deeper content effectively.
- Divides content into manageable chunks for faster page rendering.
- Helps Google discover and index otherwise hidden or buried content.
Pagination Best Practices for SEO
So what is the best way to implement pagination?
You have 3 options:
1. Use a view all page and a single canonical tag
The idea behind a view all page is to move each page within a paginated series into a single page.
This removes the need for pagination and consolidates all linking signals into a single page.
This can be a great option, depending on how many products you have.
Large ecommerce sites however, will not want to put 1,000+ products on a single page.
That would be a horrible user experience and would also not help search engines with product discovery.
2. Use a view more button in combination with infinite scroll
Infinite scroll is a user centric practice that enables all products to continuously loading as a user scrolls down a page. This is used to boost engagement.
When you think of infinite scroll, think of platforms like:
3. Use Crawlable Paginated Pages
Give each page a distinct URL and link to the next page with an <a href> element. Each component page should normally have its own canonical URL.
I still recommend keeping clean rel="next" and rel="prev" markup where it is already maintained. That is an implementation preference, not a Google indexing requirement. It cannot replace crawlable links.
So with all that said, below are the recommended best practice pagination tips for SEO on ecommerce websites.
Pagination for Ecommerce Websites
Pagination serves as a navigational function that aids discovery for both users and search engines, as both can navigate your website by following internal links to deeper pages.
This is what makes pagination a core technical SEO element for ecommerce websites.
When you have a huge range of products, serving thousands of paginated pages does not make sense and does your website no favours.
To handle pagination in a scenario like this, here are the key things to do:
1. Go Granular in your catrgories
Outside of pagination itself, the information architecture of your website plays a huge role in how Google bot discovers landing pages on your site.
Within reason, the more categories you can make to house unique products the better. Here are the SEO benefits of this:
- Granular categories allow crawling bots to discover products that would otherwise be buried in higher level categories
- They give users another discovery path
- Opens up the opportunity to rank for specific longtail category keywords
2. Utilise mid-point pagination
Mid-point pagination is where you can drastically improve crawl depth on an ecommerce website.
Crawling bots follow links on your website to discover content.
So if you have 1,000 pages in a paginated series, where your pagination is set up sequentially, for example: (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ,9 10), then the crawl depth on your deeper categories is very high.
A high crawl depth means crawlers may not discover your paginated pages at all.
Google still uses paginated pages for product discovery. So in turn, products on your website may not get indexed if their linking category page cannot be crawled!
How to set up mid-point pagination:
With 1,000 products and 20 products per page, the collection has 50 pages. One possible navigation set on page one is:
1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 20, 30, 40, 49, 50
On page 25, the controls could show:
1, 10, 20, 24, 25, 26, 30, 40, 50
These are illustrative layouts. Keep adjacent-page links and choose useful longer jumps for the size of the collection.
Or if you have a smaller range of products, it can be built with shorter intervals:
1, 2, 3, 10, 17, 18, 19
Regardless of your product inventory, the idea of mid-point pagination is to allow crawling bots quick access options to deeper paginated levels in your website in just a few steps.
You can reduce the count of paginated pages by increasing the count of products per page. This is where you’ll need to strike your own balance.
I think 16-24 is typically a good amount per page.
The SEO benefit of mid-point pagination:
Here are the SEO benefits of utilising mid-point pagination:
- Increased crawl rate of deeper pages
- More links followed to product pages
- Increased product discovery
- More products indexed by Google
- Increased rankings
Final note on this:
If you retain next/prev markup, point it to adjacent pages. Longer jumps belong in the visible navigation.
Handling Pagination Tags, Canonical Tags & Parameters Together
A parameter does not automatically make a page a duplicate. Choose a canonical URL by comparing the content, not by removing the query string.
For example, if a tracking parameter leaves the content of page two unchanged, that version can point to the clean page-two URL. Keep the page number in the canonical target.
<!-- Illustrative duplicate: https://example.com/products/page/2/?utm_source=email -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/products/page/2/">A filter can change which products appear. Do not automatically canonicalise that selection to the unfiltered collection. Decide which filtered pages should be available in search and review the canonical, crawl and indexing rules together.
Pagination FAQs
Paginated simply means the process of numbering a document. Think of it like a book.
When it comes to websites, pagination is used to split resource load between pages, whether that be for articles or more commonly, for product listings on an ecommerce website.
The benefit of this is faster load times and a better user experience for customers.
Yes. Google treats a paginated page as it does any other normal webpage.
Links are followed, metadata is read, and they can be indexed.
When implemented properly, pagination helps:
- Increase crawl rates
- Improve page discovery
- Help user navigation
- Increase click depth
- Add more internal links
All these elements have an impact on SEO.
Yes, as the practice of pagination on a website is there to split out data sets loaded on a page.
By splitting data sets across multiple pages, you can reduce load times on each page, as the total resource load is reduced.
Summary
Use pagination when a collection needs more than one page. Make each page reachable through crawlable links and check that deeper items can be discovered.
It is a factor that needs to be considered by both SEO’s and web developers.
Properly utilising pagination can go a long way in your SEO efforts!
If you have any further questions, please leave a comment below. And if you love what you read, we would greatly appreciate a share!