Pagination

Contents

  1. Relationship: next/prev
  2. Canonical
  3. Page break with links
  4. Infinite scroll
  5. Index status

You can implement pagination in different ways. Which one that suits you best depends on the search volume of your products.

You need to consider if you want to transfer internal link value from category pages and brand pages to product pages. In your case, I recommend doing it as there is a lot of direct searches for your products.

Therefore, you should do the following:

Based on: https://www.domain.dk/category/

For page 1, page 2, page 3, etc. you can use this URL structure:

Or:

It is important that you do not create links to page-1 or page=1 as they do not exist. The first page in the series is always just: https://www.domain.dk/category/.

If an URL does not exist, it needs to return a 404-status code. If your series consists of three pages and page 4 is requested (https://www.domain.dk/category/page-4/) it has to return a 404-status code.

Relationship: next/prev

Google does not use rel=next/prev anymore but other search engines might. If you choose to implement the rel-tag, it is done as follows:

The rel-tag is inserted between <head></head>.

Example
If you have three pages in the series, the implementation must look like this:

Page 1: https://www.domain.dk/category/ refers to the next page:

<link rel="next" href="https://www.domain.dk/category/page-2/" />

Page 2 refers to the previous page and the next page:

<link rel="prev" href="https://www.domain.dk/category/" />
<link rel="next" href="https://www.domain.dk/category/page-3/" />

As page 3 is the last page in the series, it only refers to the previous page:

<link rel="prev" href="https://www.domain.dk/category/page-2/" />

Canonical

You need to have a self-referring canonical tag on all pages, i.e. page 2 has a canonical tag to page 2, page 3 to page 3, etc.

Page break with links

To ensure that Google crawls all pages, it is important to always have a standard <a href=””>Anchor<a> link to all pages in a pagination series:

How to use self-canonical in pagination
Credits: searchenginejournal.com

Infinite scroll

If you use infinity scroll, use History API for page breaks. This means that your URL automatically changes to page 2, page 3, etc. as the user scrolls down the page. You can see an example here: https://scrollsample.appspot.com/items

Make sure that:

  • The page number always correspond to the content presented.
  • All pages of the series can be accessed directly so Google can crawl and index the content.
  • Lazy load is implemented so all relevant content is loaded in the visible viewport.
  • IntersectionObserver API is used to support paginated loading in the case of infinity scroll. Do not use scroll events. This is the most effective way to make Googlebot follow the invisible components.

To make sure that the above is implemented correctly, you should test the configuration locally by using Puppeteer script.

Source: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-friendly.html
Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/lazy-loading

Index status

Many websites use a noindex, follow tag on page 2, page 3, etc. to avoid them being indexed in Google. However, this means that eventually, they stop transferring internal link value to the products on the pages. Read more here: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-long-term-noindex-follow-24990.html.

Therefore, all pages in the series (those you want to transfer link value) should have an index, follow tag. By doing this, page 2, page 3, etc. can – just as https://www.domain.dk/category/ – be shown in Google on different keywords. However, we can assure that https://www.domain.dk/category/ is the primary result in Google by doing the following:

Metadata

To avoid duplicate metadata, these should be automatically generated for page 2, page 3, etc.

Title tag page 2:
Page 2 of category | Domain.dk

Description page 2:
Page 2 of category. Shows 40 to 80 out of 200 products. Category in all price ranges.

Onsite text

Page 1 contains a good onsite text. Page 2, page 3, etc. do not have onsite texts.

Internal links

Internal links from other pages should always go to the first page of a series, that is https://www.domain.dk/category/.

Published by martin