Why is pagination an SEO topic?
You’ve surely heard that pagination can be detrimental to a website's SEO: this is both true and false, because the problem is not with the pagination itself, but with the way it’s implemented.
Indeed, pagination poses both crawl and indexing problems because the more paginated content we have, the more the Google robot must click to successfully index all our content, which is detrimental to the optimization of our content’s indexing. We can draw 2 conclusions:
Do not implement pagination if you don’t need it: a website with very few products for example.
If you need to, carry on reading for the detailed method!
2. The perfect pagination
2.1 The number of pagination links to display
Our favorite method to determine how to organize your pagination:
On each page, we systematically give access to the 1st and the last page.
We give access to every ten pages.
We give access to the 3 previous and 3 next pages when possible
We do not link to the page we are on.
Here is what it will look like:
We are on page 1:
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 10 - 20 - 30 - 40 - 50 - 60 - 70 - 80 - 90 - 100 (links are in bold)
We click on page 60:
1 - 10 - 20 - 30 - 40 - 50 - 57 - 58 - 59 - 60 - 61 - 62 - 63 - 70 - 80 - 90 – 100
We click on page 63:
1 - 10 - 20 - 30 - 40 - 50 - 60 - 61 - 62 - 63 - 64 - 65 - 66 - 70 - 80 - 90 – 100
And finally on page 100:
1 - 10 - 20 - 30 - 40 - 50 - 60 - 70 - 80 - 90 - 97 - 98 - 99 – 100
Is it a good idea to increase the number of products per page to reduce pagination?
The answer is no! If we create too many links, there would be a risk in diluting the SEO juice (PageRank) too much → that’s why we recommend you not to put more than 30 products for each category page.
2.2. The technical checklist
Each page must have a canonical self-referencing tag: <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.website.com/category?page=2”>
Set up the pagination tags in the HEAD part of the HTML code: rel=”next” and rel=”prev”. Each page will have a tag that matches the previous page’s URL, and the next page’s URL to indicate that there is a previous and an next page.
Example if we are on page 3:
<link rel=”prev” href=”http://www.mywebsite.com/url-2.html>
<link rel=”next” href=”http://www.mywebsite.com/url-4.html>
So page 1 only has a “next” tag and the last page only has a “prev” tag.
Summary of the 2 points above:
Index / Follow on all paginated links: we want all pages to be well indexed, so do not put the “noindex” and “nofollow” attributes on these pages’ robots meta tag.
Each page’s Title and Meta description tags are those of page 1 with always “page N” at the end, for the current page. Whereas page 1 should never have the indication "page 1" in its tags.
The text on page 1 (SEO text or in general the text to present the category) must only be on this first page and never on the others.
Page 1’s URL should never have "page 1", unlike others which should have this indication.
Likewise, when we’re on a page other than page 1, the link to page 1 is indeed the link without pagination. Example: https://www.galerieslafayette.com/c/chaussures-femme/p:3, this link to page 1 is not the “/p:1”.
Links: in order for search engines to effectively crawl paginated pages, the site must have anchor links with href attributes to those paginated URLs. In other words, use <href="our-url-paginated-here> tags for internal links to paginated pages. Warning: do not load paginated anchor links or href attributes via JavaScript.
Can we do infinite scrolling to avoid pagination?
Googlebot cannot properly understand the bottom of the page’s behavior, nor “clicking to load more” behavior. If we want this type of behavior, we will have to help bots crawl our content!
To be SEO-friendly, you have to convert the infinite scroll to an equivalent series of paginated pages that are accessible even if JavaScript is not enabled.
When the user scrolls, use JavaScript to adapt the URL on the address bar to the corresponding paginated URL (as if there was a real pagination).
Here's an interesting example that is working: http://scrollsample.appspot.com/items?page=4.
→ In this case, we always implement the SEO best practices recommended above, but we only add the user experience functionality on top!
Offer the client the possibility of having one-page pagination:
With this method, we show the Internet user the possibility of seeing the pagination’s content on the same page. However, make sure not to forget to put a canonical towards the single page in all short versions. Here is an example:
Learn more on the same topic:
Site depth: how to spot problems and correct them?
Internal links: identify technical problems with your internal network
Have you found your answer?