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In 2017, John Mueller casually mentioned in Office Hours that noindex pages may eventually be treated as nofollow by Google.

What?!

In a room full of SEOs at the agency I worked at, this dropped like a bomb.

If true, this meant every noindex pagination page we thought was just excluded from results might also stop passing link equity. Google would stop crawling

Cue panic.

(We also found out that every team had a different strategy for pagination 😄, but this is a story for another time)

I took the unpopular stance: let’s keep paginations non-indexable. They were causing cannibalization problems anyway - Google was surfacing “Page 3” over core category URLs.

Still, the debate burned.

When I started working with a massive e-commerce client (600,000+ products across thousands of categories), I saw the perfect opportunity to test it for real.

The Experiment That Cost 9 Months (But Gave Me Clarity)

We unlocked indexation of pagination across half the store.

Every 3 months for 9 months, I analyzed server logs to see if Googlebot crawled deeper once pagination became indexable.

Results?

No crawling improvement.

But the side effect?

Keyword cannibalization - Google started ranking page 5 of a category instead of the main page (in many cases).

Exactly what I feared.

I finally had proof: treating pagination as indexable didn’t help crawling, and it hurt rankings.

And yes, this client is doing the best they ever did in terms of SEO and are growing without indexed pagination.

Imagine pagination like plumbing.

When it flows cleanly (crawlable links, no JS, proper canonicals), your site works.

But turn on indexation when it’s not needed? It’s like clogging every pipe in Google’s house.

Crawling is the same, but index bloats + Users land on the wrong pages.

You’re One Pagination Decision Away From a Cannibalization Disaster

Want to avoid this mistake?

Here’s my pagination checklist. Use it. Stick to it. Share it.

And if you're facing indexing or crawl issues from faceted nav, filters, or pagination - don’t guess.

Reply “Pagination Audit” and I’ll walk you through the exact fixes I use for enterprise ecom clients today.

Here I audited Tiffany & CO. - huuuuuge global jewelry store. Before you ask, yes, they also struggle with pagination.

🔎 Google: Long Term Noindex Will Lead To Nofollow On Links
[Search Engine Roundable]

🔎 The Ultimate Pagination - SEO Guide
[Audisto]
(probably the most insane pagination guide I read, worth it 100%)