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Many SEOs become overly concerned about pagination issues, which leads to poor decisions. There is a belief that paginated pages can cause content cannibalization or issues with canonical tags, but in practice these issues are extremely rare. This fear often leads to the implementation of so-called “solutions” that are not only unhelpful, but can also create additional complexity. One such solution is to use "noindex, follow" tags.
First, using "follow" doesn't matter since it's the default behavior for all pages. Secondly, if a page is marked as "noindex", then, according to Google's recommendations, all links on that page will be automatically treated as "nofollow". This means that internal links that you want to use to promote other pages are no longer effective, which can negatively impact your SEO.
Canonicalization to the first page of pagination is another popular “solution” that often turns out to be ineffective. Google usually ignores this approach because the paginated pages have different content and canonical tags don't work properly. Moreover, incorrectly setting up canonical links can cause Google to start ignoring all canonical tags on your site, reducing the credibility of your resource. Even if canonicalization works, you lose the ability to effectively use internal linking.
The rel=prev / rel=next tag is also no longer important for SEO, since Google stopped supporting it a long time ago. The use of this tag does not affect the indexing and ranking of pages in the search engine.
Blocking paginated pages through the robots.txt file is another myth in SEO. This method will not stop the pages from being indexed, and links to them will still not be counted for internal promotion. In some cases, of course, you can use robots.txt with caution, but in most cases it does not make sense and can lead to problems with indexing.
The main problem with pagination on large sites is not the process of breaking content into pages itself, but the incorrect structure of internal links. When a page with pagination ends up in search results by mistake, it is most often caused by incorrect or weak internal linking. Instead of working around these problems with ineffective methods, you should work to improve your site's link structure and navigation.
For most webmasters, the optimal solution is to leave pagination pages alone and focus on improving the quality of content and internal links, which will significantly improve SEO results.
To conduct a full SEO audit of your website and receive additional recommendations for optimization, you can contact our studio. Write to us by email info@seo.computer.
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