Agent Wranglers

SEO Recommended

Give paginated lists their own addresses

Give every page of a long list its own URL, linked with plain <a href> links. Each page carries a canonical to itself, never to page one.

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated .

How to do it

Use a query parameter or path, such as ?page=2. Link each page to the next and previous ones. Google no longer reads rel="next" and rel="prev", so the plain links do the work. Infinite scroll and "Load more" buttons must also update the address and keep those links in the HTML.

Example

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/shoes?page=2">
<nav aria-label="Pages">
  <a href="/shoes">Previous</a>
  <a href="/shoes?page=3">Next</a>
</nav>

How to check

A crawler following only <a href> reaches the last page of every list. Each page's canonical equals its own URL.

For agents: if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in Based on the Agent Wranglers website playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/website/seo/pagination.