What is Pagination?

Pagination is the practice of dividing a long list — products in a category, posts in a blog archive, results of a search, comments under an article — into a series of pages: page 1, page 2, page 3 and so on, each linking to the others. It keeps pages fast and usable, but it also creates many URLs with similar templates that search engines must crawl and understand.

How Google treats paginated pages

Google’s guidance on pagination and incremental page loading sets out the current rules:

• Give each page its own URL, usually with a query parameter such as ?page=2. Don’t use URL fragments (#page=2); Google ignores them.
• Link pages sequentially with normal <a href> links so crawlers can reach every item, ideally also linking back to the first page.
• Give each page a self-referencing canonical. Page 2 is not a duplicate of page 1; it lists different items.
• rel="next" and rel="prev" are no longer used by Google as an indexing signal — Google confirmed this in 2019. They’re harmless, and other engines or browsers may still use them, but don’t rely on them.

Example: page 2 of a category

<!-- https://www.example.com/trail-shoes/?page=2 -->
<head>
  <title>Trail Running Shoes – Page 2 | Example Outdoor</title>
  <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/trail-shoes/?page=2">
</head>
<body>
  …24 products…
  <nav aria-label="Pagination">
    <a href="/trail-shoes/">1</a>
    <a href="/trail-shoes/?page=2" aria-current="page">2</a>
    <a href="/trail-shoes/?page=3">3</a>
    <a href="/trail-shoes/?page=3">Next</a>
  </nav>
</body>

Note that page 1 is linked as /trail-shoes/, not /trail-shoes/?page=1, so there aren’t two URLs for the first page.

Infinite scroll and “load more”

A “load more” button or infinite scroll that fetches items with JavaScript is fine for users, but crawlers don’t click or scroll. Back it with paginated URLs: each batch should also be reachable at a real ?page=N address linked from the page, and the URL in the address bar can update as the user scrolls.

Common mistakes

• Canonicalizing every page to page 1. This tells Google to ignore pages 2+, so products that appear only deeper in the list may never be discovered through it.
• Noindexing paginated pages. It keeps them out of results, but over time Google may also stop following their links, cutting off deep items.
• Blocking ?page= in robots.txt, which stops crawling of everything beyond page 1.
• Endless parameter combinations — pagination multiplied by sort orders and filters — which can waste a large part of your crawl budget. Keep sort and filter variants out of the crawlable link graph where possible.
• Very deep pagination. If an item is 40 clicks from the category page, link to it more directly through subcategories or better internal linking.

How to check

Open page 2 or 3 of a category and run it through the Canonical Checker. It shows the canonical tag in the HTML and HTTP headers, whether it is absolute and self-referencing, and whether the target returns 200 and is indexable — the details that most often go wrong on paginated series.

Frequently asked questions