Pagination SEO Guide

Key Principles

Each paginated page should be individually indexable and canonicalize to itself.

Google deprecated rel="prev"/"next" in 2019, but many other search engines still use them.

Self-referencing Canonical

Each paginated page should have a self-referencing canonical tag:

<!-- On /blog/page/1 -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/blog/page/1">

<!-- On /blog/page/2 -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/blog/page/2">

rel="prev" / rel="next" (legacy)

<!-- On page 2 of 5 -->
<link rel="prev" href="https://example.com/blog/page/1">
<link rel="next" href="https://example.com/blog/page/3">

<!-- On first page -->
<link rel="next" href="https://example.com/blog/page/2">

<!-- On last page -->
<link rel="prev" href="https://example.com/blog/page/4">

URL Patterns

<!-- Recommended patterns -->
https://example.com/blog/           (page 1)
https://example.com/blog/page/2/    (page 2)
https://example.com/blog/?page=2    (query param, acceptable)

<!-- Avoid -->
https://example.com/blog/2          (ambiguous)
https://example.com/blog/#page2     (fragment, not indexable)

Infinite Scroll SEO

For infinite scroll pages, provide parallel paginated URLs for crawlers:

<!-- Paginated version for crawlers -->
<link rel="alternate" media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)"
      href="https://example.com/blog/page/2">