Pagination and SEO

Pagination is a functionality that allows us to divide large sets of items into different pages. We normally see it in blog post listings or online stores. But it is often a source of frustration or conflict, since its existence or lack thereof can cause serious issues in terms of crawling, performance, or user experience. In this post we’ll look at the key aspects, the options Google gives us, and we’ll try to find the least bad option.

Pagination or infinite scroll?

From a user perspective, pagination is annoying and generally avoided—people prefer not to have it. But from a development perspective, we often need it, because loading a list with a thousand items is not reasonable in terms of usability or loading speed. 

Let’s check Google’s documentation about pagination, where they tell us we have three options:

1. Paginate
2. Load more: without pagination, we show a set of items and the user can request more when needed
3. Infinite scroll: as the user scrolls down, more products load

In general, users prefer infinite scroll, but it’s very likely that our project cannot implement it due to technical limitations—or because some SEO experts insist on not using it. Keep in mind that whatever loads only when the user scrolls or presses “load more” won’t be crawlable by Google. This means we may have many problems getting certain content crawled and indexed, and we’ll need to compensate elsewhere. In other words, we’ll have hundreds of orphaned items. If that happens, we must ensure those products are linked from somewhere else. How can we do this?

1. Creating different categories, taxonomies or groupings from different angles. A product may not appear high in its main category, but it might appear in a brand or subcategory listing.
2. Working on SILO linking, adding links between posts (related products or related posts).

Pagination (or the lack of it) has a strong impact on UX, but in this post we focus more on the SEO perspective. From that perspective, let’s see what pagination gives us and why SEOs usually prefer it in their projects:

• GOOD: it limits DOM size and loading time, improving Page Speed and similar metrics
• GOOD: it reduces crawl depth to final items (a product that is on page 22 can be placed 2 clicks away from the home instead of 23)
• BAD: pagination pages have low semantic quality, with little meaning beyond page 1, and they consume crawl and indexation budget

There is a hybrid option sometimes called fake infinite scroll. In these pages, as you scroll, products load and give the feeling of infinite scroll, but in reality you are accessing different pages without clicking. It’s subtle—visible only in the browser bar. With this system we keep pagination while the user doesn’t notice, but WARNING: we lose the internal links from page 1 to the rest, and with that, the crawl depth. You’ll see this in some of our projects; it’s not a bad middle ground.

If your project uses pagination, our humble opinion on what is the least bad way to handle it is:

• Use rel="next" and rel="prev" tags, just in case (they won’t hurt)
• Canonicals should be self-referential: page 2 should canonicalize to itself, not to page 1. If you canonicalize to page 1, Google may stop crawling the remaining pages and the content inside them (products, posts…)
• Even if you prefer them not to index, it’s usually better to let Google index them. If you apply noindex, again, you risk “turning off” the content inside (products, posts, etc.). You’ll see that we use this transparent approach on our own website:

Advanced pagination tips

 Once the basics are set, here are some tips that can be very useful for complex projects:

1. In large e-commerce sites, main categories can accumulate many pagination pages. To avoid this, the main category can link only to its subcategories, and if showing products, show only a curated selection. This reduces pagination and places star products at a shallower depth.
2. If you have huge pagination, you won’t be able to link to every page from 2 to 2022. Consider linking by tens or other intervals that make sense for your structure, reducing crawl depth.

Conclusions

In a perfect world, we would love to have a website without pagination, using infinite scroll, but with tools that ensure all items get crawled one way or another. This is an ideal scenario but very hard to achieve due to technical or resource constraints, but it’s something to strive for. In the meantime, we must learn to manage paginated and non-paginated projects as best we can, but still fully rankable.