Page 1 Ranks. Pages 2 Through 47 Are a Black Hole.
Sound familiar?
Pagination is one of those "boring" technical SEO problems that quietly destroys rankings. Especially on e-commerce sites with hundreds of category pages. If you run an online store, our e-commerce SEO strategy guide covers this alongside other critical issues.
The Core Problem
Each paginated page (page 2, page 3, etc.) has unique products or content. But search engines often see them as thin content because each page only shows a small subset.
Google discontinued support for `rel="next/prev"` as an indexing signal. So you cannot just slap those tags on and call it a day anymore.
What Works in 2026
Option 1: Load more / infinite scroll with crawlable links. Let users load more products dynamically, but keep paginated URLs crawlable for bots. Best of both worlds.
Option 2: Self-canonicalize each page. Let Google index all paginated pages. Each page has unique content (different products). Just make sure each one has a self-referencing canonical.
Option 3: View-all page. If feasible, offer a single page with all products. This is the strongest option for SEO but can be slow for large catalogs.
What NOT to Do
Do not canonical all paginated pages to page 1. Pages 2-47 have unique products that deserve indexing. Ahrefs covers pagination in their technical SEO guide with additional examples.
Do not noindex paginated pages. Same reason — unique content.
Do not block them in robots.txt. Google cannot consolidate signals if it cannot crawl them.
Keep your pagination clean. It is one of the 113 tasks in seocheckup.app. Free. No credit card.