Pagination and SEO
Two pieces of pagination advice, adding rel="next" and rel="prev" and pointing every page’s canonical at page one, are contradicted in plain sentences on Google’s current page about pagination. A third, giving every page a distinct title, is one Google says a paginated series can skip.
This page quotes those sentences and turns the rest into three checks you can run against your own markup. The documentation sits under Google’s ecommerce section, which is where it is easy to miss, and nothing in it is limited to shops.
rel="next" and rel="prev" do nothing
Google no longer uses them, and its documentation says so:
In the past, Google used <link rel="next" href="..."> and <link rel="prev" href="..."> to identify next page and previous page relationships. Google no longer uses these tags, although these links may still be used by other search engines.
The second half of that sentence is the reason to leave existing tags alone. Google does not read them; other search engines may. Adding them to a new template buys nothing from Google, and ripping them out of an old one buys nothing either.
What replaced them is an ordinary link. Google asks you to “include links from each page to the following page using <a href> tags”, which is the same mechanism that finds every other page on your site.
Do not point page two at page one
Google rules this one out directly:
Don't use the first page of a paginated sequence as the canonical page. Instead, give each page its own canonical URL.
A canonical says two URLs hold the same content. Page two of a product list holds different items from page one, so a canonical pointing at page one makes a claim that is not true.
Every page in the sequence gets a self-referencing canonical. Open page two, copy the source, and paste it into the canonical tag checker. It reports the canonical the markup declares, which is the fastest way to find out what your template is doing.
Titles go the other way: for a paginated series, Google relaxes its usual advice. “Normally, we recommend that you give web pages distinct titles to help differentiate them. However, pages in a paginated sequence don't need to follow this recommendation. You can use the same titles and descriptions for all pages in the sequence.” So the duplicate-title warnings a crawler raises across a paginated series are not something Google asks you to fix.
Load more and infinite scroll
Google treats these as user-experience choices and makes one mechanical point about both:
Google's crawlers don't "click" buttons and generally don't trigger JavaScript functions that require user actions to update the current page contents.
So a button that loads the next batch of items leaves them reachable by a person and unreachable by a crawler, unless real links to real URLs exist somewhere as well. That is why the pattern is safe on a page whose items are each linked from somewhere else, and costly on a page that is the only route to them.
The same page rules out putting the page number after a #. “Don't use URL fragment identifiers (the text after a # in a URL) for page numbers in a collection. Google ignores fragment identifiers.” To Google, a URL ending in #page=2 is the same URL as page one.
Three checks against your own markup
These are Google’s three named best practices, with the check each one implies. The documentation was last updated 2025-12-10.
1Link pages sequentially
Each page carries an ordinary link to the next one. Google also suggests linking every page back to the first, as a hint that the first page may be the better landing page.
View the source of page two. If the link to page three is a button or an onclick handler rather than an a href, Google’s crawler generally will not follow it.
2Give every page its own URL
A query parameter such as ?page=n is the example Google gives. Each URL in the sequence is treated as a separate page.
Load page two and look at the address bar. If the only thing that changed is the text after a #, Google sees one URL where you meant several.
3Keep filtered and sorted copies out of the index
A list that can be reordered by price or filtered by colour produces many URLs holding the same items in a different order.
Count how many parameters your list accepts. Every combination is a URL, and Google names noindex or robots.txt as the two ways to stop them being indexed.
On the third, Google names the two mechanisms itself: “To avoid indexing variations of the same list of results, block unwanted URLs from being indexed with the noindex robots meta tag or discourage crawling of particular URL patterns with a robots.txt file.” The two are not interchangeable, and indexed, though blocked by robots.txt is what happens when robots.txt is used where a noindex was wanted.
What a crawl of your own site answers
Checks one and two are the same question asked of every page at once: can a crawler following only links reach the whole sequence, and does each page name itself as canonical. ShownTrue’s crawl follows links in the markup from page to page, and records the canonical and the depth of every page it reaches.
Its honest state: the crawl, the canonical reading and the depth are built and tested. It has no report that names a paginated series as such, so reading the output for this question is still something a person does. The capability page says exactly what is built.