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How should pagination be handled for SEO on article and product archives?

Technical SEO Indexing Pagination
1Answer 0Helpful 24Views Oct 5, 2026Asked
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Category and archive pages may span many pages. Should page 2 and beyond be indexed, canonicalized to page 1, or blocked?
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0 reputation · 0 solved · answered Oct 5, 2026
Pagination should preserve crawlable access to deeper items while avoiding misleading canonicalization. Page 2 is not usually a duplicate of page 1 because it contains different items.

1. Give each pagination URL a stable crawlable URL and generally let it self-canonical when it represents a real page in the sequence.

2. Do not canonical every paginated page to page 1 unless the content is genuinely equivalent.

3. Use normal anchor links for Next/Previous and page numbers so crawlers can traverse the sequence.

4. Keep important items linked from stronger hubs or related pages so they do not depend solely on deep pagination.

5. Avoid endless parameter combinations for sorting and filtering that multiply archive URLs.

6. If using infinite scroll, provide crawlable paginated URLs or another server-accessible discovery path.

Pagination is primarily an information-architecture problem. Make the sequence crawlable, stable, and distinct, then control unnecessary filter/sort variants separately.
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