Pagination

One user asked whether Googlebot is advanced enough yet to handle infinite scrolling. John explains that pages are rendered by Google using a fairly high viewport. Usually, this means that some amount of infinite scrolling is triggered. However, it all depends on the implementation. The best way to check is to run the page through the Inspection tool to get a clear view of what Google is actually picking up.

John tackled one of the most common questions asked of SEOs; how should we be handling canonical attributes on paginated pages? Ultimately, it depends on the site architecture. If internal linking is strong enough across the wider site, it’s feasible to canonicalize all paginated URLs to page 1 without content dropping from the index. However, if you rely on Google crawling pages 2, 3… and so on to find all of the content you want to be crawled, make sure that paginated URLs self-canonicalize.

An excessively flat site architecture, such as having a very large sitewide navigation or linking to all pages in a paginated set from page 1, may confuse Google about the site hierarchy, which page to rank, and what to show as Sitelinks.

Headings and page titles with a number help Google to identify a set of paginated series of pages which belong together, but they can usually figure it out based on links between the pages.

When implementing infinite scroll, ensure Google is able to reach all of the pages involved. John recommends the best way to do this is by linking to all the pages individually through a pagination set up, to ensure each page can be crawled.

John recommends being cautious implementing infinite scroll on publishing sites because having multiple pieces of content in the same HTML might be confusing for Google if they are individual pieces of content.

When a page is rendered, Google expands the viewport and then contracts it to try to fit the primary content on the page. Expanding the viewport could trigger one or two infinite scrolls on pages with this functionality, but would not cause Googlebot to keep triggering this and infinitely crawling pages.

Focusing on improving internal linking across product and blog post pages is a good strategy for ensuring Google is able to find these pages on your site rather than relying on pagination.

John explained that Google treats paginated pages in the same way as any other page on a website. While Google does try to understand how pages fit into the context of a website as a whole, they do not apply an attribute to pages to indicate it is a paginated page.

Although rel=next/prev is no longer used by Google, John doesn’t recommend removing it from a site as it is still used by some browsers for prefetching and by other search engines.