Pagination

Written by Cobus van der Westhuizen, reviewed by Wynand van der Westhuizen, fact-checked by Lenata Oosthuizen. Last reviewed July 2026. Editorial policy.

What Is Pagination?

Pagination is the practice of splitting a large collection of content into smaller, numbered sub-pages. It is most commonly seen on e-commerce category pages (page 1, page 2, page 3 of products), blog archives, forum threads, and search results.

Each paginated page has its own URL, typically indicated by a query string such as -page=2 or a URL path like /category/shoes/page/2.

From a user experience perspective, pagination improves page load speed by limiting the number of items loaded at once. However, from an SEO perspective, pagination creates a technical challenge: multiple pages that share similar template content, headings, and metadata can appear to Google as duplicate content.

The correct approach depends on the type of content. For an e-commerce store, page 1 of a product category often ranks better if it is treated as the canonical version of the series.

Subsequent pages can be indexed if they contain unique product listings that users might search for directly, or they can be noindexed to conserve crawl budget if the products are individually indexed on their own pages.

Google deprecated support for the rel=prev and rel=next link attributes in 2019, announcing they had not been used as indexing signals for some time. The current recommended approach is to ensure paginated content is crawlable via HTML links, use canonical tags where appropriate, and include key paginated pages in your XML sitemap.

Pagination In Practice

The scenario below is an illustrative example, not a Juicy Designs client result. The figures indicate the scale of effect that pagination work typically produces, so treat them as indicative rather than measured.

Picture a Cape Town fashion retailer running a WooCommerce store with a "Women's Dresses" category of around 300 products spread across 30 pages. An SEO audit might reveal that pages 2 through 30 are all being indexed, each with near-identical H1 and meta description tags.

That would dilute ranking signals for the category landing page and waste the site's crawl budget on pages that rarely rank independently.

The recommended fix would involve adding a canonical tag on pages 2 through 30 pointing to page 1, and updating the title and meta description templates on paginated pages to acknowledge their position (e.g., "Women's Dresses, Page 2 of 30").

The most important individual products should be indexed on their own product detail pages rather than relying on paginated category pages for discovery. Once implemented, the category page would typically consolidate its ranking signals, and the retailer's SEO performance for category keywords could plausibly improve.

What pagination is

Pagination is the division of content across multiple pages, with navigation (such as numbered page links, or next and previous links) to move between them, commonly used where there are many items or a long list to display, such as product listings in an ecommerce category, blog post archives, search results, or long articles split across pages. Rather than showing hundreds of items on a single, endless page, pagination breaks them into a series of pages (page 1, page 2, and so on) that users navigate between, which manages large sets of content and can aid usability and performance. Pagination is common on ecommerce category pages (products across multiple pages), blog and content archives, and anywhere long lists are divided. Pagination has SEO considerations, chiefly around how search engines crawl, index and understand paginated series: the pages in a paginated set need to be crawlable (so search engines can reach the items on later pages), and the handling of paginated pages (whether and how they are indexed, and how the series is understood) affects how the content is discovered and how the paginated pages appear in search. Historically, there were specific techniques for signalling pagination to search engines (such as rel=prev and rel=next link attributes indicating the sequence), and Google's handling of pagination has evolved over time, so understanding current best practice matters. Understanding pagination matters because it is a common way of structuring large sets of content, with real implications for how search engines crawl and index the content across the pages, so knowing what pagination is, dividing content across multiple navigable pages, and its SEO considerations, helps a business handle paginated content (like ecommerce listings and archives) well, ensuring the content across paginated pages is discoverable and appropriately indexed.

Pagination and SEO best practice

Handling pagination well for SEO centres on ensuring the content across paginated pages is crawlable and appropriately indexed, and on following current best practice, since Google's approach to pagination has evolved. The key principles are: make paginated pages crawlable, so that search engines can follow the pagination (through crawlable next/previous or numbered page links) to reach and discover the items on later pages, since if later pages are not crawlable, their content (such as products on page 2 onward) may not be discovered, so crawlable pagination links are important for the content across the series to be found; and handle indexing sensibly. On whether paginated pages should be indexed, the general current guidance is that each page in a paginated series can be treated as its own page, and it is usually appropriate to let the paginated pages be indexable (rather than noindexing later pages) so that their content is discoverable, while ensuring each has appropriate, self-referencing canonical tags (each paginated page canonicalising to itself, not all to page 1, since canonicalising all pages to page 1 can hide the content of later pages from indexing), so that the content across the series remains discoverable and correctly handled; the aim is that the items on all pages of the series can be found and indexed. On rel=prev and rel=next: Google previously used these link attributes as a signal of paginated sequences, but Google announced some years ago that it no longer uses rel=prev/next as an indexing signal (it now handles pagination through its general crawling and understanding), so rel=prev/next are no longer required or used by Google for pagination (though they may still be used for accessibility or other purposes, and some other systems may consider them), meaning the current best practice does not rely on rel=prev/next for Google, but instead on crawlable pagination, sensible indexing (self-referencing canonicals, letting content be discoverable), and good structure. Ensuring important items are also reachable through other means (like category structure and internal linking) helps, and for very large sets, sensible structure and crawlability matter for crawl efficiency. For a South African ecommerce business, handling pagination means ensuring its paginated pages (such as product listings across multiple pages) are crawlable so all products are discoverable, letting the paginated pages be indexable with self-referencing canonicals so their content can be found and indexed (rather than canonicalising everything to page 1 or noindexing later pages, which can hide content), and not relying on rel=prev/next for Google (which no longer uses them), while ensuring good overall structure and internal linking so items are reachable. Because pagination affects whether the content across a series is discovered and indexed, handling it with crawlable pagination, sensible self-referencing canonicals, and awareness that Google no longer uses rel=prev/next, ensures the content on all pages is findable, which is the key to good pagination for SEO, particularly for ecommerce sites with large paginated listings.

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