What is the pagination of a website used for in SEO?

The pagination of a website is a crucial element to improve the SEO of your site. It helps make your content easier to navigate for users and search engines.

By using pagination, you can divide your content into smaller, more manageable sections. This helps users find what they're looking for faster, and also adds extra structure to your site that's good for search engines.

Pagination is also important for search engines because it allows you to create separate URLs for each page of content. This means that search engines can crawl (discover and read) each page independently, increasing your site's visibility for relevant search queries.

It's also important to note that pagination should be used strategically to help crawl and discover products or blog posts.

By using pagination correctly, you can improve your site's user experience and increase its visibility for search engines. The purpose of pagination is not to generate visits but to make products or articles accessible to Internet users and bots. Pagination can be crawl budget intensive so it can be an advantage or a disadvantage

Top 7 actions to put in a website (in classic cases):

Pagination must also be managed in HTML.

Even if Google reads other languages ​​more and more easily, it is not its mother tongue! So exit the pagination only coded in JS or in AJAX., AJAX, etc., and keep the correct basic HTML format

The pagination must have rel= “next” and rel= “prev” tags.

Google has said that thanks to its evolution that it no longer needs these two tags to identify the following and previous pages. Except? Google is not alone (even if it remains the majority), so let's not forget that Bing always takes this nomenclature into account when adding them. 

Presence of rel=”next” and rel=”prev” tags

The pagination must have selfs-canonicals tags.

Indeed, there is a common practice on the web to put a canonical tag on all pages that link to page one. However, this practice can harm the crawl of the pagination pages and therefore the reading of the elements listed on pages 2 and above. Each page must have its own canonical tag that links to itself. 

The page does contain a canonical tag to itself

Pagination must be allowed in robots.txt.

To facilitate Google's readability on the various pagination pages, it is essential that the nomenclature of these pages is not blocked from Google's visit. 

Pagination must be integrated into the sitemap.

To increase Google's visit to pagination pages that often contain essential links to product or article pages, we advise you to integrate your pagination URLs directly into your Sitemap.

The pagination of a website must have a unique nomenclature.

It is a question of harmonization. As for the nomenclature of your Title, your pagination URLs must respect particular writing that you are free to define.

The pagination must have a rule for writing your Title.

In order not to have duplicates in the writing of your Title, we strongly advise you to increment the number of your page directly in your Title in order to show your users and Google that they are not on the same page.

What are the impacts of these patches on your natural referencing?

If your pagination respects all our recommendations above, then it's a safe bet that you will soon be able to see a certain evolution of Google vis-à-vis your website.

For this, two solutions are available to you:

1. Go to the Google Search Console crawl report linked to your property: you will surely be able to see an increase in GoogleBot crawls.
2. Analyze the logs of your website linked to Google: you will have the most precise exploration data on Google's visits to your website and in particular if your pagination pages are regularly crawled by Google.