🔎 Focus: Pagination Crawling & Indexation
🔴 Impact: High
🟡 Difficulty: Low
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Do not try this at home
Unless you are properly guided (by us).
You’ve been warned.
A few months back I share a boring indexation post on LinkedIn. Well, I thought it was regular boring Wednesday post. It wasn’t!
It brought me almost 100k impressions instead.
Some people read too quick and thought I was suggesting to implement “noindex,nofollow“ to all paginated landings on your website, which was not the case:
I took my time and try to reply everyone in the comments.
One thing I noticed:
This is an experiment on indexation and should be executed carefully as testing ground. We run it on multiple clients and worked just fine. Yet by no means it is a fundamental truth.
Keep Paginations Non-indexable
In 2017, John Mueller casually mentioned in Office Hours that noindex pages may eventually be treated as nofollow by Google.
Time travel (2017): https://www.seroundtable.com/google-long-term-noindex-follow-24990.html
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.
Time for the Tech SEO Experiment
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.
Knime Workflow I used for the Server Log Analysis
And yes, this client is doing the best they ever did in terms of SEO and are growing without indexed pagination.
My baby is growing (yea it sounds creepy now, I see it after I wrote it)
Pretty cool chart
Pagination Is Like Plumbing - Invisible Until It Bursts
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.
Make sure pagination contains
<a href>linksAvoid JS-only pagination
Add crawlable links to infinite scrolls and “Load more” implementations
Use
rel=prev/nexttags (still helpful for Bing and others)Use self-referencing canonicals
Further paginated pages should NOT be indexable
Improve pagination linking (Pagerank sculpting if you’re brave)
Redirect non-existent paginated URLs - no infinite pagination loops
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.
How To Analyze Technical SEO on Enterprise Stores.
Here I audited Tiffany & CO. - huuuuuge global jewelry store. Before you ask, yes, they also struggle with pagination.
I got a sore throat right after recording this. Not my best weekend
Until next time 👋
Recommended Reads
🔎 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%)
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