Pagination and SEO: A Complete Guide to Best Practices

You need to reduce the number of links from the pagination landing page to the specific paginated pages. This article by Google explains how to go about making a page canonical among pagination in web application other pages with duplicate content. Ideally, depending on the number of products that you have, you would want to split them into categories if you have multiple products.

• The website offers a “More Resources” section on each of its blog pages with related content for users along with a “Suggested Articles” section.
• According to a recent survey, over 70% of the users spend their viewing time on a website for the first two folds of the content.
• That is because people are hard-wired to recognize patterns, even when there are none.
• More specifically, it allows you to specify the page number and the page size (limit).

Not all sites can have all their information on a single page. Websites may need to use multiple pages for easier navigation, better user experience, buyers journey, persona, etc. Reviewing paginated content can improve your site’s user experience. However, if you have thousands of products or pages, a “view all” option might be too much for users. And Google might not be able to access all the content behind an infinite scroll depending on how it’s set up, according to Google’s John Mueller. De-optimizing paginated pages encourages search engines to display the main page (or root page) in the search results.

Content-Driven Visual Pagination

As a typical example of large sets of items to show to users, a Google web page always has the pagination design pattern informing users of their location within the set at the bottom of the page. Here, we are right at the first page of hits – prime SEO ‘real estate’ in other words. Effective mobile pagination balances functionality, simplicity, and a seamless user experience. Follow these principles to ensure users can navigate content efficiently without frustration or confusion.

There are a few different ways to implement pagination, but the most common is to use numbered page links at the bottom of each page. This allows readers to quickly jump to any point in the content without scrolling through everything that came before it. Pagination streamlines the pages on a website so that visitors to the website can easily navigate them and access the information that they are looking for. However, it is also a tricky process that requires expertise from an SEO standpoint.

Pagination Dilutes Ranking Signals

In contrast, infinite scrolling is best suited for social media sites. People enjoy scrolling aimlessly on such sites while seeing a variety of posts. Since pagination can weaken the ranking signals of your website, it is important that your link quality is kept in check.

When you’re browsing through a website, have you noticed how you often click on a number or a ‘next’ button to continue reading or viewing content? That’s pagination at work—a system that divides web content into a series of pages, making it more digestible and easier to navigate. Pagination plays a crucial role in structuring content for better website navigation and organizing the website layout for a better user experience. While these alternative pagination methods aren’t as prevalent as standard techniques, they offer unique ways to enhance user experience and engagement.

Contents

The term can also refer to the physical process of creating individual pages by hand or with machinery. This may be something that is hard to do if you look at things from the perspective of the ‘old’ pagination techniques, which advised that only the pagination landing page needs to be indexed. If you had already used pagination on your site, there is no need to remove it. Sites like e-commerce and news sites have no option but to keep using pagination. The Index Coverage Status report will come in handy here to show you which of your paginated pages are being indexed. They are also likely to have similarities in their on-page SEO, for example, meta descriptions, h1 tags, anchor text, CTAs, and page titles.

For example, we have a category with sneakers, and we want to create landing pages for search deliveries with different brands, using parameters in the URL. This helps search engines understand the relationship between paginated pages. However, poorly designed pagination can disrupt the user experience. If page numbers are too close together or if there’s no clear way to move to the next chunk of content, users can become frustrated.

Use Parameter URLs for the Paginated Pages

Pages exclusively for screen output are more commonly known as screens, windows, interfaces, scenes, or cards. In the case of presentation software, electronic pages are known as slides. The benefit of pagination lies in the fact that organizing long articles into multiple pages provides a better experience for the reader. In general, pagination is used whenever a body of content needs to be divided into separate pages, whether for printing or digital delivery. It is a simple and effective way to make large amounts of content more manageable and user-friendly.

It is also worth noting that search engines might penalize sites for excessively long paginated content. There are sites that allow filters in order to show more relevant options to the user. These filters create new and unique URLs based on the parameters used to filter. Items on your paginated pages need to be ordered based on priority. Paginated pages containing the most relevant content are only a few links from the landing page.

Pagination works like a skilled librarian who’s efficiently organizing and presenting books (in this case, data) so that you can easily find what you are looking for. And similar to how there are different ways to catalog books, there are different ways to segment, or paginate, data. For example, compare the average engagement time (the average time your site was in focus in a user’s browser) across different pages. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) can tell you how people behave on your paginated pages. Pay attention to the number of clicks each page gets and its position. Next, follow our configuration guide to set up your site’s audit for your needs.

You would not want your pages to compete with each other for the same keyword. Slideshare is a platform that aggregates across a huge number of categories, and the best way to offer the users a seamless experience is to segregate their content with pagination. The site provides pagination to the users alphabetically or numerically. Some SEO pros recommend avoiding the issue of pagination handling altogether by simply blocking Google from crawling paginated URLs. Many sites have seen Google select a paginated page to rank over the root page for a search query. Be sure your site uses for internal linking to paginated pages.

You can observe a decent implementation of this technique on the last branches of the directory on wikimart.ru. Depending on how they are organized, some of your paginated pages will likely have similar or identical content. Additionally, you will frequently discover that your site’s SEO title and meta description tags are identical. Using keywords in the anchor text that links back to the most valuable pillar pages on your website is a very good SEO practice. Make sure that you use variations of your target keyword across the pages to avoid any instances of keyword cannibalization.