Google: Why Search Engines Don't Need To Do Anything Special For Pagination

In 2019, Google stopped using rel prev and next as a signal for its search engines to combine or understand paginated results on your site. Then Google offered up some other advice over the years on the topic. Now, John Mueller of Google explains why Google or other search engines don't need to do anything special for pagination or paginated results on your site.

John's latest on this topic is within this LinkedIn thread where Jan Caerels asked:

Something I have never understood fully. If Google understands your pagination & aggregates everything to one page (the clean URL usually), should the pagination URLs you see in the screenshot still show up under Indexed pages? John Mueller Gary Illyes

I remember having a case like this looong ago, where the paginated URLs were ranking on the main keywords, eg. "cheap monovolume cars" it was /cheap/monovolumes?page=12. In that specific GSC account, I saw all URLs indexed seperately in the "Indexed pages" report.

John replied, "I don't think a search engine needs to do anything special for "pagination". Why shouldn't a URL be a URL?"

He then goes on to explain that if Google wants to find something special or unique within the paginated series, it will. If there is nothing special or valuable there, then why bother. URLs are URLs, he said.

Here is what John said word for word:

If something's useful on the page, it's useful; If it's not on the page, it's not on the page. What would you do if you were building a search engine? Would you crawl 100 pages of a paginated set and only store them combined in a single URL and treat all other pages as unique pages? It feels (looking from a distance) like an unnecessary complication.

(I think there are a few topics like this in SEO - where the assumption is that search engines will do something fancy when in most cases, it doesn't need to be fancy. A lot of technical SEO is about being explicit with what you want, and "what you want" in many cases is a strategic decision, often not one that has an absolute & global answer. This one of the pieces of beauty & source of frustration with technical SEO :-))

Is it this simple for you?

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.