Pagination: Unlinked Pagination URLs

URLs contained in the rel=”next” and rel=”next” attributes are not linked to across the website.

Pagination attributes do 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.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Pagination’ tab and ‘Unlinked Pagination URLs’ filter.

To populate this filter ‘Crawl Analysis’ must be performed via ‘Crawl Analysis > Start’.

The unlinked pagination URLs can be exported in bulk via the ‘Reports > Pagination > Unlinked Pagination URLs’ export.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Audit rel=”next” and rel=”prev” Pagination Attributes’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when URLs in the rel=”next” and rel=”next” attributes are not linked elsewhere on the website.

For example:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

Has the tag:

<link rel="next" href="https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/page2/">

But https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/page2/ is not linked to from anywhere on the website (i.e. it’s an orphan page).

How To Fix

Ensure paginated URLs are linked to within <a> tags. This will allow them to be crawled and indexed, and pass PageRank onto any URLs they link to.