What is Pagination And How to Implement It

Imagine you visit a website, and it takes your whole life for the content to load. Would you still stay there or leave? We expect the latter. This is where pagination plays its role.

Most website owners prefer pagination to increase not only the user experience but also to improve SEO. But what is pagination and how does it impact SEO? Go through this detailed blog to learn.

What is Pagination in SEO?

Pagination is a term used in SEO that primarily means breaking or organizing a series of content into a multi-page list.

Pagination makes use of links or numbered buttons to help the reader move through the archived content ultimately helping with better navigation.

Pagination makes it easy for visitors to navigate through the website, as it shows different products or content in manageable chunks.

You can see its best examples on new portals, archived blog pages, and category pages of e-commerce websites.

Pagination vs. Load More vs. Infinite Scroll

Formatting long pages can also be done with Load More or infinite scroll. Let’s explain what each one is specifically:

Load More

“Load more” is a web design feature that allows you to load additional content by click on a button that says “see more” or “view more” An example of this is used on the skechers website

This approach is often used to improve website performance, as it initially loads a limited number of items and only retrieves more data when requested by the user.

By doing this, it reduces the initial load time and can enhance the overall user experience, particularly on slower connections or devices with limited processing power.

Infinite Scroll

“Infinite scroll” is another feature where additional content automatically loads as you scroll down the page. Rather than separating content or products on different pages, infinite scroll allows to put all the content on a single page.

“Infinite scroll” can keep you engaged for longer periods. This design approach can lead to higher user retention and more time spent on the site, as you would be less likely to leave when you don’t encounter interruptions.

This type of formatting is commonly used on social media platforms and content-heavy websites such as pinterest to keep users engaged and reduce the friction of manual interaction.

It’s totally up to you whatever type of formatting you want to choose for your website, however keep in mind that even though infinite scroll and load more have their own user experience benefit, they might no be ideal for SEO.

Advantages of Pagination in SEO

As the information is split into several pages via pagination, a website’s usability is naturally increased. The more your website’s usability is high, the more there are chances of increased visibility in the search engine.

Following are some crucial advantages of pagination in SEO:

1. Improves User Experience

Pagination efficiently improves user experience because it allows the user to swiftly go through large amounts of content. When pages are numbered, the user gets the intimation of how long they have traveled through your content and how much is left to navigate.

For example, when you are surfing on a website to buy something, you could see numbered pages below for that particular product.

This way you get to know on which page you are and how many more pages are left to view. This is how pagination allows the user to simply choose which page to land on and save their time.

2. Page Loads Faster

The fast-moving world holds a narrow tolerance for waiting. SEO pagination allows the content to break up into a series of content to look through and hence results in faster loading.

A fast-loading page not only improves user experience but is also a critical ranking factor for search engines.

Furthermore, a page that loads faster reduces high bounce rates- the percent of people who leave your website after viewing the first page only.

As you improve your website’s page speed, you increase the chances of ranking higher in the search engine results.

3. Internal Linking

Pagination gives you the opportunity to utilize internal linking. Internal links are links present on your web page that point to different pages on your website.

This ultimately helps the search engine to understand the structure of your site and to crawl new pages faster.

Let’s put it this way: You have a highly authoritative page that gets a lot of visitors and is ranking in the top positions on Google, you can use internal links from that page to other less authoritative pages.

This strategy passes link juice to these pages, helping them rank better in search results.

Can Pagination Hurt SEO?

Pagination can help your website organize content and improve user experience however, it can still affect your website’s SEO rankings through duplicate content which can occur on the page level, where you have two or more identical pages, or on the keyword level.

Recommended Reading: what is SEO cannibalization and how to fix it

Duplicate content occurs when you have the same content through multiple pages on your site. This can cause a negative impact on your website for multiple reasons:

Search Engine Confusion

When search engines encounter similar content across different pages, they may struggle to determine which page is the most relevant for a given search query.

Essentially, when multiple pages on your site have identical content, Googlebot ends up evaluating and ranking those pages against each other rather than focusing on your competitors.

This internal competition can dilute the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and hinder your ability to rank well for your target keywords, as the search engine is unable to prioritize one page over the others.

Inefficient Crawling

Search engines have a limited crawl budget, which is the amount of resources they allocate to crawl your site. Duplicate content can cause crawlers to waste time and resources on similar pages, potentially preventing them from discovering and indexing other important content on your site.

Best Practices of Pagination in SEO

1. Add canonical tag on each page

Canonical tag is a kind of self-referencing on each paginated page that prevents duplicate content. You can find duplicate content by running your website through a free SEO audit.

The tag is a way of letting the search engine know the preferred page on your site. A canonical tag is usually found in the head section of the webpage and looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/preferred-url-here/"/>

When a canonical tag is added to a webpage’s HTML code that points to the same page, it achieves self-referencing. This tells search engines that the content on that page is the primary version.

Make sure to use tools like screaming frog to always check your website and audit canonicals as well as performing an SEO content analysis for all your content.

2. Your Anchor List must be Crawlable

You can invest ample time in SEO pagination but if Google can't access your webpage, it’s a complete waste. Therefore, ensure that your anchor links are crawlable. You can achieve this by:

• Adding a Clear URL: Make sure each paginated page has a distinct and descriptive URL. For example, use URLs like example.com/products/page-2 rather than generic or ambiguous URLs.
• Including Attributes of href: Ensure that your anchor links have proper href attributes that point to the correct paginated pages. For instance, <a href="/products/page-2">Next Page</a> allows Googlebot to follow the link to the next page.
• Adding Closing Tags: Verify that all your HTML tags are properly closed. For example, each <a> tag should have a closing </a> tag to prevent any issues with link rendering and crawling.

In short, the page links must look like HTML coding.

3. Use of Clear URLs

A clear URL helps the user and the search engine to effectively navigate the paginated content. SEO used to implement an older way of adding attributes of ‘rel=prev/next’ to denote the association between paginated pages. It used to look like this:

<link rel="prev" href="https://example.com/blog/">

<link rel="next" href="https://example.com/blog/page-2">

Add a self-referencing canonical tag in the <head> of each paginated page.

By adding a self-referencing canonical tag in the head of each paginated page, you can have pages that look like this:

Page 1: <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/products/">

Page 2: <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/products/page-2">

Page 3: <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/products/page-3">

Google can easily understand the association between each paginated if they hold these types of URLs.

4. Do not Use URL Fragment Identifiers

URL fragment identifiers, or hashes, are the parts of a URL that follow the “#” symbol. For example, in the URL **https://example.com/blog#section1**, #section1 is a fragment identifier.

Google typically overlooks fragment identifiers when crawling and indexing pages. As a result, if your paginated content uses fragment identifiers, it might not be crawled or indexed by Google.

The Best Solution? Use query parameters instead.

Query parameters are added to the end of the URL and look like this:

• Example URL with Query Parameters: https://example.com/blog/?page=2

Query parameters are search engine-friendly and allow Google to effectively crawl and index each page in your paginated series. This approach ensures that all your content is accessible to search engines.

5. Optimize Paginated Content

For SEO pagination, it is crucial that you treat your pagination pages similar to any other page. Make sure you are taking care of the following:

• Optimize your paginated page for speed and better user experience.
• Add keywords in meta descriptions, headings, and subheadings. Strategic use of keywords across paginated web pages.
• Add alt-text to images. This optimizes not only search engines but also better user experience.
• Responsive design should be used for mobile visitors.

Conclusion

By organizing large amounts of content into manageable chunks, pagination not only makes it easier for users to navigate through a website but also helps in faster page loading, reducing bounce rates, and improving overall usability.

Implementing effective pagination correctly involves best practices such as adding canonical tags, ensuring anchor links are crawlable, using clear URLs, and optimizing paginated content.

Pagination offers significant benefits for SEO if implemented correctly, allowing search engines to index multiple pages effectively.

This can significantly enhance both user satisfaction and search engine rankings, making it a crucial element of any online strategy.

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