Pagination

Pagination

The pagination tab includes information on rel=”next” and rel=”prev” HTML link elements discovered in a crawl, which are used to indicate the relationship between component URLs in a paginated series. The filters show common issues discovered for pagination.

While Google announced on the 21st of March 2019 that they have not used rel=”next” and rel=”prev” in indexing for a long time, other search engines such as Bing (which also powers Yahoo), still use it as a hint for discovery and understanding site structure.

Pagination attributes should be placed in the head of the document and looks like this in HTML:

<link rel="prev" href="https://www.example.com/seo/"/>
<link rel="next" href="https://www.example.com/seo/page/2/"/>

Columns

This tab includes the following columns.

• Address – The URL crawled.
• Occurrences – The number of canonicals found (via both link element and HTTP).
• Indexability – Whether the URL is indexable or Non-Indexable.
• Indexability Status – The reason why a URL is Non-Indexable. For example, if it’s canonicalised to another URL.
• rel=“next” – The SEO Spider collects these HTML link elements designed to indicate the relationship between URLs in a paginated series.
• rel=“prev” – The SEO Spider collects these HTML link elements designed to indicate the relationship between URLs in a paginated series.
• Canonical Link Element 1/2 etc – Canonical link element data on the URI. The SEO Spider will find all instances if there are multiple.
• HTTP Canonical 1/2 etc – Canonical issued via HTTP. The SEO Spider will find all instances if there are multiple.
• Meta Robots 1/2 etc – Meta robots found on the URI. The SEO Spider will find all instances if there are multiple.
• X-Robots-Tag 1/2 etc – X-Robots-tag data. The SEO Spider will find all instances if there are multiple.

Filters

This tab includes the following filters.

• Contains Pagination – The URL has a rel=”next” and/or rel=”prev” attribute, indicating it’s part of a paginated series.
• First Page – The URL only has a rel=“next” attribute, indicating it’s the first page in a paginated series. It’s easy and useful to scroll through these URLs and ensure they are accurately implemented on the parent page in the series.
• Paginated 2+ Pages – The URL has a rel=“prev” on it, indicating it’s not the first page, but a paginated page in a series. Again, it’s useful to scroll through these URLs and ensure only paginated pages appear under this filter.
• Pagination URL Not In Anchor Tag – A URL contained in either, or both, the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes of the page, are not found as a hyperlink in an HTML anchor element on the page itself. Paginated pages should be linked to with regular links to allow users to click and navigate to the next page in the series. They also allow Google to crawl from page to page, and PageRank to flow between pages in the series. Google’s own Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller recommended proper HTML links for pagination as well in a Google Webmaster Central Hangout.
• Non-200 Pagination URL – The URLs contained in the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes do not respond with a 200 ‘OK’ status code. This can include URLs blocked by robots.txt, no responses, 3XX (redirects), 4XX (client errors) or 5XX (server errors). Pagination URLs must be crawlable and indexable and therefore non-200 URLs are treated as errors, and ignored by the search engines. The non-200 pagination URLs can be exported in bulk via the ‘Reports > Pagination > Non-200 Pagination URLs’ export.
• Unlinked Pagination URL – The URL contained in the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes are not linked to across the website. Pagination attributes may not pass PageRank like a traditional anchor element, so this might be a sign of a problem with internal linking, or the URLs contained in the pagination attribute. The unlinked pagination URLs can be exported in bulk via the ‘Reports > Pagination > Unlinked Pagination URLs’ export.
• Non-Indexable – The paginated URL is non-indexable. Generally they should all be indexable, unless there is a ‘view-all’ page set, or there are extra parameters on pagination URLs, and they require canonicalising to a single URL. One of the most common mistakes is canonicalising page 2+ paginated pages to the first page in a series. Google recommend against this implementation because the component pages don’t actually contain duplicate content. Another common mistake is using ‘noindex’, which can mean Google drops paginated URLs from the index completely and stops following outlinks from those pages, which can be a problem for the products on those pages. This filter will help identify these common set-up issues.
• Multiple Pagination URLs – There are multiple rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes on the page (when there shouldn’t be more than a single rel=”next” or rel=”prev” attribute). This may mean that they are ignored by the search engines.
• Pagination Loop – This will show URLs that have rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes that loop back to a previously encountered URL. Again, this might mean that the expressed pagination series are simply ignored by the search engines.
• Sequence Error – This shows URLs that have an error in the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” HTML link elements sequence. This check ensures that URLs contained within rel=”next” and rel=”prev” HTML link elements reciprocate and confirm their relationship in the series.

For more information on pagination, please read our guide on ‘How To Audit rel=”next” and rel=”prev” Pagination Attributes‘.