Pagination

Pagination in plain English

Pagination splits a long list, such as products, blog posts or search results, across several pages: page 1, page 2 and so on. Google's pagination guidance recommends giving each page its own URL, linking pages sequentially with normal links and not pointing every page's canonical at the first page. Google no longer uses rel="next" and rel="prev" as signals.

How to check pagination on your site

Click through your longest category or blog listing. Does each page have its own URL? Are there normal links between pages? View the source to check canonical tags point to the page itself rather than to page one. Use URL Inspection to check later pages are crawlable.

A worked example

A bookshop's category pages use a "Load more" button that only works with JavaScript, with no separate URLs. Google sees only the first 24 books in each category. Adding standard paginated URLs behind the button means all books can be discovered.

Where it usually goes wrong

• Infinite scroll with no crawlable page URLs.
• Canonicalising every page to page one.
• Blocking paginated pages in robots.txt.
• Making listings so long that important items sit dozens of pages deep.

Why a small site should care

If paginated pages can't be crawled, products or posts beyond the first page may never be found. If every page canonicalises to page one, Google may ignore the items on later pages. Shops and blogs with many items need pagination that works for both visitors and crawlers.

Getting it right matters most for shops and listing sites, where products or posts beyond page one would otherwise be hard to discover. A small brochure site rarely needs to think about pagination.

Connected technical terms

• Faceted navigation: Filter URLs that can create crawl and duplicate issues if uncontrolled.
• Canonical URL: The preferred URL for duplicate or similar content, declared with rel=canonical.
• Crawl: When a search engine bot discovers URLs by following links and sitemaps.