8 Pagination Best Practices to Ensure It Doesn’t Hurt Your SEO

With great growth, comes great responsibility for improving user experience on a website. 

One of the ways to do that is through SEO-friendly pagination. 

It’s something most website designers are conflicted with. When your page is too long or offers too many categories, is it viable for your user to keep scrolling or is it better to split these pages up sequentially? 

And if you split the content into categories, does it work in favour of your SEO or against it? 

We’re as curious as you to know the answers. 

Pagination SEO needs to be a part of your regular technical audit. Let’s check out why it’s essential and some SEO pagination best practices.  

What is Pagination? 

Pagination is a design technique on a website in which you organise content by splitting it across different pages. So instead of having one huge page that the user has to keep on scrolling, you can make several pages and number them in order. 

You must’ve noticed that many eCommerce, news and even SaaS websites leverage pagination. It is helpful for sites that actively publish blogs and have a repository of content that can be split into different pages. 

While it’s a common practice, most website developers don’t consider optimising a website for pagination. Besides, if not done correctly, pagination can even pose a threat to your SEO efforts. This is why most brands opt for SEO agencies that specialise in pagination SEO. 

Is Pagination Good for SEO?     

1. Faster Page Load 

A slow-loading page is a nightmare for users and subsequently for brands. Statistics show that a website needs to load within 2.5 seconds if it wants to improve conversions. Google consistently ranks page speed as a part of its ranking factors under technical SEO. 

With pagination SEO, your webpage can load faster as you only display a partial amount of content. With faster loading times, you’re improving your chances of ranking higher on the search results and generating more traffic. 

2. Improved User Experience 

88% of customers may not return to a site with a bad user experience. When you’re providing users with a plethora of information at once, it may overwhelm them and prompt them to look elsewhere for answers, resulting in a poor user experience. 

What pagination essentially does is break important information into small and readable pieces that users can easily track. It results in a better user experience on a website and higher engagement. 

Infinite Scroll vs Pagination SEO

If not pagination, what other options do websites have? 

It’s the infinite scroll. 

This is a design practice where the content continually loads as the user reaches the bottom of the page. The flow of information is endless on a single page itself. This technique is widely popular on social media pages with user-generated content like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and other image-heavy websites. 

The fact that you see both infinite scrolling and pagination in practice, it’s evident that you cannot have a ‘one-method fits all’ approach. 

Infinite scrolling has worked best for sites where users prefer to scroll rather than click, and discover new items rather than look for something specific. It has also worked for brands that have a significant number of mobile users and that place emphasis on mobile-first indexing.  

The user experience differs on mobiles and desktops. Pagination is almost redundant on mobile devices as numbers are too small to click on mobile interfaces. Besides, the smaller the screen, the longer the scroll. Users have a better scrolling experience on the phone because it is intuitive and easy to use. 

The type of content also influences the choice of Infinite Scroll vs Pagination SEO. Brands with more visual content rely on infinite scroll whereas text-heavy content websites opt for a pagination technique. 

What is Pagination in SEO? 

Pagination can both benefit your SEO and pose risks. But, the risks associated with SEO are only a result of improper implementation. To fully leverage the potential of pagination, it’s crucial to know the SEO pagination best practices. 

SEO Pagination Best Practices

1. Use Crawlable Anchor Links 

If you’re opting to add pagination to your WordPress or Wix website, you need to make sure that Google can access your links. You fix this by ensuring that your anchor links are crawlable. Add the anchor tag <a> with an href attribute. This helps search engines effectively crawl paginated pages. In HTML coding, this tag would look something like 

<a href=”https://supple.com.au/blog-archive/page/3/”a>

You can also link from paginated pages to the starter page to let Google know that your first page is a better landing page than the rest of the web pages in the series. Some common mistakes that most developers make are 

• Placing attributes on the page and not on the HTML code
• Using either rel= ”prev” or rel= ”next” instead of both 
• Putting the canonical URL on the root of the page 

Additionally, even though Google has mentioned it doesn’t use rel= ”next” and rel= ”prev” attributes, you can add them to indicate a relationship between component URLs. 

2. Self-Canonicalize Webpages 

One highlighted disadvantage of pagination is the duplication of content. This is often a result of improper canonical tags. The content is duplicated because Google considers all the pages unique and independent of one another. In reality, the paginated pages are all a part of the “view all” page. The idea of pagination isn’t to have multiple web pages but to break a single huge page into multiple smaller pages without the issue of duplication. 

To address this issue, developers can add the same canonical tag to all the paginated pages so that Google will only index the “view all” and ignore duplicate content. You can add a self-referencing canonical tag at the head of each paginated page. This also helps the search engines know which pages you want to display in the search results. 

3. Avoid Using URL Fragment Identifiers

Fragmented identifiers are the hashes in URLs. You want Google to treat URLs in paginated sequence as distinct pages. To do so, use URL testing on the principle of URL/n where n is the page number in the sequence.  

The reason fragment identifiers don’t work is that Google ignores them and does not recognise the text following the hashtag. If the bot sees such a URL, it may ignore it thinking it has already crawled the page. 

You can instead use query parameters as the SEO pagination URL structure. Query parameters involve adding a “?” before the sequence number. For example, 

https://supple.blog.com.au.blog/?page=2

Query parameters are search engine friendly and allow them to crawl paginated content as they treat each URL as a unique one. 

4. Decide if you Need a “View all” page. 

Most small businesses use a “view all” option along with pagination. And yes, it is okay. But the keyword here is small businesses or rather small websites. Websites with limited content, limited pages, and limited categories. For example, say you’re a small online jewellery store in Melbourne. 

Your range of customers is limited to Australia and you have a small repository of content about the latest jewellery trends or collections, etc. Considering you have limited website visitors, you can take the liberty of offering a “View all” option along with pagination, where users can access all of your content on a single page. 

However, if you decide to do this, you need to add the same canonical tag to the View All page as the paginated pages. The View All page should contain a self-referencing canonical tag so that Google ignores the duplicate content. You also need to ensure that the View All page can load quickly despite the large number of content so that it doesn’t pose a problem for SEO. 

However, if you’re a medium-sized business or an enterprise, it is not wise to have a View All page at all. It can negatively impact the user experience as visitors may find it hard to navigate a View all page. They are overwhelmed with information and cannot view content based on categories or in stages. It also results in page load problems because of the large pieces of content. 

5. Avoid Noindexing Pagination Pages to Control Crawl Budget 

When a website adds a “noindex” tag to a webpage, it instructs the search engine to not index a page in the search results. Websites add these tags to paginated pages so that they don’t appear in Google results. The idea is to exclude all paginated URLs from the index except the first one. This way, websites can optimise their crawl budget and prioritise their essential URLs to be indexed by Google. 

However, this practice can have serious consequences for your SEO. Long-term noindex of a page can lead to nofollow links from Google of the said noindex page. Google will stop acknowledging the noindexed page, remove it from the index, and ignore the links on that page. 

This can complicate the indexation of the content links from the paginated pages and exclude essential URLs that bring you traffic from the search engines. Instead, allow pagination pages to be indexed rather than worrying about the crawl budget, especially if you have a smaller site. Another alternative is to create internal links to those linked pages from other relevant content sites so they don’t go unnoticed.

6. Add Internal Linking Formula to Pagination 

One of the SEO pagination best practices includes adding internal links to paginated pages. Google treats pagination SEO the same way as it treats internal links. It helps Google understand your site structure and passes authority to pages which in turn improves your rankings. 

While creating internal links, context is very important. Instead of linking on words like “click here” or “learn more”. Using keyword-rich anchor text can give the reader more context and benefit your SEO. It is also not wise to have the same anchor text throughout your page as Google finds it spammy. Don’t have too many internal links on a single page and identify the authority pages of your site to pass authority. 

If you can identify a paginated page that is important to you in bringing authority, create links that lead to it. It will help users get to that page quickly from other relevant content. For example, if your company provides a marketing automation tool, you can divert the readers to a paginated collection of customer support articles and case studies. This builds your page authority and helps the users discover all the information about a topic under one web page. 

7. Optimise Content on Paginated Pages 

You need to treat your pagination pages in terms of content and internal linking just like how you’d treat the rest of your pages on your website for optimising SEO. The idea is to ensure that the paginated pages in the series also have value as independent pages. The user should find value every time they click on the next page in the series. 

This is only possible if high-quality content is given equal importance on paginated pages as the first page or the category page. To optimise the content on paginated pages, conduct keyword research, place the keywords strategically across the web pages, add alt-text to images, and include keywords in headings, subheadings, and meta descriptions. There are tools available like AISEO that help you automate your pagination SEO and optimise content for the same. 

8. Monitor Results of Pagination

Just like you monitor the SEO of your website, one SEO pagination best practice includes monitoring the results for pagination SEO too. You can do that using the pagination filter in the Google search console. It shows you the traffic on pagination pages, indexed pages, etc. Integrate analytics tools like Google Analytics. It shows the visitor behaviour on those sites. You can check the same by filtering the landing page report on Google Analytics. 

Leverage Best Practices for Pagination SEO with Supple

Once you understand the fundamentals of pagination SEO, you’ll notice that most traditional SEO techniques apply to pagination web pages too. However, the SEO pagination best practices need to be executed with caution as some areas fall into complex technical SEO that you may not have the experience to deal with. 
Supple can help you optimise SEO for pagination and adopt the best practices for your pages to rank higher on search engines. Contact us on how we can aid you develop a pagination SEO strategy that works for you and improves your online traffic.