Implementing Pagination: Everything You Need to Know About Pagination

What is pagination?

Pagination indicates which pages belong together and the order in which the search engine should crawl these pages. Pagination is set up using the HTML tags ` rel="prev" ` and ` rel="next" ` in the page’s source code.

Prev stands for the previous page, and next stands for the next page. You should include these tags in your website’s .

When should you use it?

As mentioned earlier, it is recommended to use pagination for online stores and blogs. Online stores are a good example of this. An online store often offers a large number of products, with multiple products falling under the same category.

To prevent the website from taking too long to load and to ensure a smooth user experience, spread the products across multiple pages. For example, some online stores have dozens of pages that belong to a single category.

Nevertheless, the pages do belong together, but without pagination, the search engine cannot recognize this. As a result, duplicate content is created because all the pages are similar.

Duplicate content leads to a lower ranking and also causes the search engine to favor one page over the others. You can prevent this by setting up pagination. This makes the relationship between the pages clear.

Although Google generally prefers content that is all on one page, pagination is recommended to reduce load time.

Ultimately, you want a user-friendly website, but you also want as much of it as possible to be crawled and indexed without loading too many items.

How do I implement pagination?

Implementing pagination involves setting up the rel="prev" and rel="next" tags, as well as setting up canonical tags. You implement these tags in the ` ` section of each HTML page.

The first page

For a blog, the first page might be /blog/. The subsequent pages are then numbered by adding /2/, /3/, and so on to the URL. In this case, the pagination might look like this:

For the first page in the series, there is no need to set a rel=”prev” tag. After all, there is no previous page.

The second page

For the second page, the pagination will look like this:

In the example above, the previous page is listed first, followed by the next page. A canonical tag has also been set.

This canonical tag points to the URL itself and prevents duplicate content. Be sure to set up the pagination correctly. If a crawler encounters incorrectly configured pagination, it will ignore the pagination entirely!

Tips for Pagination

Pagination is not a directive

It’s possible that the search engine is ignoring your pagination. This could be due to incorrect notation or the search engine intentionally ignoring the notation.

Pagination is not a directive and is therefore merely a signal to the search engine. The search engine may therefore choose to ignore it if it deems it relevant.

Don’t use endless pagination

You don’t want users or search engines to have to scroll endlessly. So be sure to choose categories and subcategories carefully when implementing pagination.

It is not advisable to use an endlessly long pagination sequence. Being easy to find also means providing clear context.

Don’t just change the tag notation for no reason

It is not recommended to rel="prev" Adjust the tag notation to rel="previous".

Although search engines often recognize this notation, some search engines do not interpret it as well. This increases the likelihood that your pagination will be ignored.