Finding what you need on a large website shouldn’t feel like slogging through quicksand. But with hundreds of products, blog posts, or resources to sift through, it can get tricky. That’s where pagination comes in—a simple but powerful way to break massive chunks of content into digestible, click-friendly pieces. Less endless scrolling, faster load times, and a clearer path forward for users moving through results.

Page pagination isn’t just good for usability—it directly impacts how search engines find and rank your content. Organizing content into smaller, structured pages makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. For users, it means a smoother experience. Here’s how pagination affects SEO, how to implement it correctly, and when to consider alternatives.

What is pagination in SEO?

Pagination divides large volumes of content into manageable chunks. In print, it means numbering pages; online, it means breaking lists or documents into separate pages, often with controls to jump between them. It’s like flipping through a book instead of unrolling a continuous scroll. Paginating a large set of products or search results, for example, makes your site load faster and easier to navigate.

Pagination is all over the internet—perhaps most obviously on Google. Rather than one infinite scroll, Google breaks search content into search engine result pages. Content appears in chunks of 10 or 20 results. Users click Next, Previous, or the page number to navigate. On your ecommerce site, you might use pagination for products, customer reviews, or blog category pages. 

Showing only 10, 20, or 50 products per page makes the browsing experience faster and more responsive. A page with hundreds of products loads more slowly, especially on a mobile device. Your web server doesn’t have to load all the product data at once—a more efficient use of bandwidth.

Which types of sites benefit most from pagination?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with infinite scrolling—it’s standard in our mobile-first world. That said, certain sites, especially those with vast content collections, are a natural fit for pagination:

• Ecommerce sites. Online stores ranging from small online businesses to Amazon all make use of pagination. Product pages are easier to digest when users can browse through 10 or 15 items at a time, instead of an endless feed. Easier navigation can encourage users to spend more time on your site, signaling higher content quality to search engines.

• Blogs and news sites. If you publish many articles, a well-designed front page paired with clear pagination lets users move from one page to the next. 

• Forums and galleries. Sites that host tons of posts and photos are ripe for threading content out to multiple pages. 

How pagination affects SEO

Pagination can help or hurt your SEO, depending on how you set it up. Here are some things to avoid if you’re planning to paginate your content: 

• Diluted link equity. Search engines use an algorithm to assess a page’s authority—high-ranking pages carry more link equity. When these authoritative pages link to paginated content, that equity can become diluted across multiple pages, potentially weakening the overall ranking strength of your site.

• Duplicate content. Duplicate content is one of the most common pagination mistakes. Paginated pages often share similar content, especially in category descriptions, headers, and footers. This repetition can confuse search engines, causing them to flag paginated pages as duplicates and potentially devalue them in search results.

• Crawl budget issues. Google has a crawl budget for every site, limiting how many pages it crawls in a given session. If a crawler spends too much time crawling your 100 paginated URLs from a product category, it might deplete its budget and miss crawling individual pages for your new blog posts and products. 

Avoid these issues and you’ve already got a decent head start at using pagination to your benefit. Here are some other elements you’ll need to cultivate as you implement pagination for your site: 

• Consolidated link equity. Properly link paginated pages using and to help search engines understand your content flow. This concentrates ranking signals instead of scattering authority across multiple URLs.

• Improved crawl efficiency. A clean pagination structure helps Google crawl your site more intelligently. When crawlers know how your pages relate, they prioritize higher-value content like featured products or blog posts, which can boost rankings across your site.

• Better indexation and relevance. When each paginated page includes optimized titles, unique snippets, and structured markup, search engines can better index your content and rank relevant pages higher in search results.

Best practices for implementing pagination for SEO

• Give each page a unique, crawlable URL
• Test the internal link structure
• Avoid URL fragment identifiers
• Manage canonical tags correctly
• Optimize titles and descriptions

Here’s how to ensure your different pages are helping, not hurting, your SEO:

Give each page a unique, crawlable URL

For Google to properly index paginated pages, it needs to find them. Make sure each page is linked using a standard href attribute or anchor tag () so Google can crawl the following page. Without proper linking, search engines may skip pages, hurting indexation and visibility. Here’s what that looks like in HTML:

Each page in a paginated sequence should have its own unique URL. There are a couple ways to do this: Add query parameters, like ?page=5, to the URL. Or, add a directory path, like /page/5, to the URL.

Here’s an example of a query parameter: 

https://myshopifymegastore.com/catalog/products?page=5

The parameter ?page=5 makes the numbered page unique. 

Test the internal link structure

Internal links are good for user experience pagination because they make content easier to navigate:

1. Ensure that Next and Previous links are in working order. Add sequential links from one page to the next to make it easy for users and Googlebot to follow the path.

2. Add links to the other page numbers in the series. This helps search engines easily discover every single page. Without links, Google might miss pages in your product category, leaving products on deeper pages un-indexed. 

3. Link to the first page in the collection from each page. When you link back to the root page (page=1), it reinforces its authority, which consolidates link equity where you want it.

Avoid URL fragment identifiers

A URL fragment is what follows a hashtag symbol (#) in the URL address. Search engines tend to ignore them. Any content on fragment-based pages will not index and, thus, will never show up in search results.

Here’s an example of a fragment that probably won’t get crawled: 

https://www.deepdiscount.biz/deep-vinyl-sale/b230734?attn_pos=2&externalId=OsUHA#!?pagenum=2 

Manage canonical tags correctly 

The canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) tells search engines which page is the preferred version when multiple pages contain similar content. 

There’s some confusion about proper canonical tag usage, so pay heed to Google Search Central’s guidance. Google advises against using the first page of the paginated sequence as the canonical page. Each page should have its own canonical URL. These are known as self-referencing canonical tags. 

To set this up, go to the section of each web page and insert the appropriate canonical tag. Here’s an example of a canonical tag used for a product category page:

Add self-referencing canonical tags on each paginated page, which lets search engines know that each page is the preferred version of its own unique URL.

Here’s a snippet from the head section of the site example above:

The self-referencing canonical tag points to page 2. Page 3 would get its own canonical tag, and so forth.

Optimize titles and descriptions

Titles and keyword-rich category descriptions inside meta tags—contained in the Head section of an HTML page— tell Google what the page is about. You can add unique content descriptions to distinguish between apparently similar content, like blog posts and products within a product category. 

Using meta tags this way isn’t technically required. According to Google’s own guidance, “Normally, we recommend that you give web pages distinct titles to help differentiate them. However, pages in a paginated sequence don’t need to follow this recommendation. You can use the same titles and descriptions for all pages in the sequence. Google tries to recognize pages in a sequence and index them accordingly.”

That said, using the title field to signify which page in a sequence is displayed can improve the user experience. For example, if you have a blog story spread out over several pages, you might append “Part 2,” “Part 3,” etc. to the title to indicate which chapter of the series is displayed.

Alternatives to pagination

• Infinite scroll
• Load More buttons
• View All pages

Pagination isn’t your only option for handling large content sets. Consider which one is right for your site based on specific goals and user experience preferences.

Infinite scroll

Infinite scroll keeps loading more content as the user scrolls down the page. It’s popular on social media sites like Facebook and Instagram.

Infinite scroll works well when you want to maximize browsing activity on the site. Customers, especially on mobile apps, are accustomed to constant swiping gestures. 

There’s a potential drawback, however. Google can crawl, but it doesn’t scroll, which means it can’t access content unless it can click a link, so there’s a good chance that most infinite scroll content won’t get indexed. 

Load More buttons

A Load More button is like infinite scroll, but the user has to manually click a button to load more content. It’s good for scenarios where the user might not want to see all the content at once. It also works well on mobile since the user can keep their thumb in one place. To make it easier for bots to crawl, make the Load More button a proper link to a new, crawlable URL. 

View All pages

The View All page is a single page containing every product or item in a category. This approach is best for small categories with a limited number of products (say, a sale with 20 items). 

Users often like to see everything at a glance. It’s the most SEO-friendly option because all the content is right there in one place—no pagination issues to worry about. But for large collections of content, View All can be cumbersome. It takes a long time to load and can hamper the user experience, which can hurt search rankings.