Definition

Pagination is the practice of splitting a long sequence of related content — search results, product listings, comments, or article archives — across multiple URLs, with navigation links connecting the pages.

Google's documentation recommends giving each paginated page a unique, crawlable URL and linking pages with standard `<a href>` anchors so Googlebot can discover them. Google deprecated support for the `rel="prev"` / `rel="next"` link relations in 2019; the markup may still be used for browsers but does not influence Google indexing. Alternative patterns such as "load more" buttons and infinite scroll should still expose distinct, indexable URLs (for example via the History API) so Google can crawl deep content.

Examples

• E-commerce category split across pages

  An online store splits its 600 shoes into 50 pages of 12 products each, linked at the bottom as `?page=1` … `?page=50`. Each page is a distinct URL with its own canonical and is reachable from the category index, letting Googlebot crawl every product without relying on JavaScript-only navigation.

Sources

• Google Search Central — Pagination, incremental page loading, and their effect on Google Search

Related terms

• Crawl Budget
  The number of URLs a search engine crawler will fetch and the rate at which it fetches them on a given site.
• Indexing
  The process by which a search engine analyses a fetched page and stores information about it so the page can later be returned in search results.
• Canonical Tag
  An HTML element that tells search engines which URL is the master copy when the same or similar content exists at multiple addresses.

Where QueryCatch uses this

• SEO Audit