Pagination.

Pagination is the division of a continuous set of content — a blog archive, product category, search results — across multiple sequentially numbered pages. While necessary for usability on large content sets, pagination creates specific SEO challenges around link equity distribution, canonicalisation, and crawl efficiency.

Previous Rel/Next and Self-Canonicals

Google deprecated `rel='prev'` and `rel='next'` pagination hints in 2019. The current recommended approach is self-referential canonical tags on each paginated page and ensuring that all paginated pages are linked internally so Googlebot can discover them. Canonical tags should not point paginated pages to page 1 — this incorrectly signals they're duplicates.

Infinite Scroll SEO

Infinite scroll — where content loads as users scroll down — can be invisible to Googlebot if the loading is JavaScript-triggered. Google recommends implementing a paginated version alongside infinite scroll: a `?page=2` URL that loads the second batch of content in HTML. This serves both users (smooth scroll) and Googlebot (crawlable, linkable content).

Pageination and Crawl Budget

Deep pagination pages (page 50 of 200) have little link equity and are rarely a crawl priority. For sites with crawl budget constraints, disallowing deep paginated pages in robots.txt and concentrating crawl on high-priority URLs may improve overall crawl efficiency. Always verify that no valuable content exists exclusively on deep paginated pages before disallowing.