Google's John Mueller was asked for tips and advice around getting a blog with thousands of pages deeply indexed. He was asked if he has any pagination tips. John responded "Use categories or tags to cross link so that you have a handful paginated pages per type, from where you link to the blog posts. Keep a good & balanced hierarchy, not too flat, not too deep."
Here are those tweets:
Use categories or tags to cross link so that you have a handful paginated pages per type, from where you link to the blog posts. Keep a good & balanced hierarchy, not too flat, not too deep.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 29, 2020
So you want to strike the right balance between having not too many paginated pages but just enough so that the structure of those paginated pages are not too flat and also not too deep. Where Google won't be served too many variations of paginated pages (not too flat) and where GoogleBot will not want to crawl so deeply into each paginated set (not too deep).
Forum discussion at Twitter.
