Best Practices
Mar 5, 2025
TLDR
Pagination enhances e-commerce UX by organizing content into separate pages, improving navigation, load speed, and search engine indexing. Proper SEO pagination prevents issues like duplicate content and crawling errors by optimizing URL structure, canonical tags, and internal linking. Following best practices, including mobile optimization and regular SEO audits, ensures better rankings, smoother user experiences, and higher conversions.
Pagination is a content-loading technique that implies splitting big volumes of web content into separate pages. It is an integral element of user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. Its core purpose is to simplify the site’s navigation and make it less overwhelming for users than seeing a huge volume of never-ending bulk content.
In e-commerce, this content-loading technique plays an especially vital role. It allows you to present product listings in an orderly manner. If you implement SEO pagination, it can also help you make your content less confusing for search engines and ensure better indexing, thus, making you more visible in organic search.
On top of that, this content-loading technique helps you give your visitors more control over how they shop on your site. For example, by preserving user state, you can ensure that buyers always get back to the same page in your listings after viewing a specific product.
All in all, implementing this element of UI in your store can secure better navigation, quicker load speeds, and positive UX, which matters for conversions and loyalty. However, if you fail to stick to pagination best practices and make common mistakes, it can also hurt your conversion.
What Is Pagination in SEO?
As you now know, this content-loading technique is generally beneficial for online stores, securing better user experience and navigation. Yet, if we’re talking about enhancing the visibility, trustworthiness, and growth of your store, it’s important to focus on the value of pagination for SEO, in particular.
So why is pagination good for SEO? By implementing SEO pagination, websites can achieve a seamless experience for both end-users and search engines, enhancing the site’s overall visibility and performance in search engines. If we dive into the mechanism behind it, implementing this content-loading technique makes it possible for search engines to view large volumes of content from your site as separate pages and index them accordingly, increasing your chances of ranking high.
There are three key elements ensuring the effectiveness of pagination in SEO:
Navigation. By helping users navigate through your store more seamlessly, this content-loading technique can greatly improve user experience, as well as the average time people spend on your site. Both these things are taken into account for your rankings.
Loading speed. Compared to other content-loading techniques, such as infinite scroll, this content-loading tactic allows better distribution of the load on your website, thus improving the loading speed. Site speed is also a direct ranking factor.
Crawling and indexing. Finally, using pagination in SEO can help you ensure that search engines crawl and index your pages correctly without issues like duplicate content.
Common Pagination Mistakes in E-commerce Websites
As you already know, the answer to the question “Is pagination good for SEO,” is generally “yes.” It can potentially add more structure to your site and provide a range of benefits that can enhance your position in search engines. Nevertheless, if you overlook the baseline SEO principles while implementing this type of content presentation, it can lead to adverse effects, such as crawling issues, duplicate content, and others.
Here are some of the biggest mistakes in pagination that can undermine your rankings and the overall success of your online store:
Misusing canonical tags. Canonical tags are links that redirect search engines to top-priority URLs for indexing. When you add the rel=“canonical” attribute to the <head> section of a page, it helps engine bots understand the primary version of the page for indexing among similar or duplicate pages. Misusing these tags can cause crawlers to ignore important URLs.
Adding canonical and noindex tags together. Placing the rel=canonical attribute next to the noindex tag confuses search engines, sending them signals that a particular page should and shouldn’t be indexed at the same time.
Poor URL structure. Complex, non-descriptive, and duplicate URLs also confuse search bots. It’s important to create a clear and unique URL structure for each discrete page.
Not including navigational links. When you break down your content into separate pages, it’s crucial to give users accessible links to the first and last page. This creates better navigation and helps crawling. You can use an <a href> tag to indicate the first and last page.
Overlooking mobile optimization. By 2028, the revenue from mobile e-commerce is projected to reach $3.35 trillion, making 63% of the total retail e-commerce. Not to mention Google’s mobile-first indexing, which means that desktop versions of sites are no longer indexed. This means a strong need for optimizing your store for mobile users, and making your navigation mobile-friendly is also important.
Having paginated pages accessible under multiple URLs. Duplicate URLs confuse search engines, complicating the crawling process. It’s recommended to use canonical tags or 301 redirects to avoid this mistake.
CTA buttons without <a href> attributes. CTA buttons can significantly improve user experience and make buyers spend more time on your site. Adding <a href> tags that will navigate users to the next page of CTAs can help you simplify navigation for users.
Pagination Best Practices for Better SEO on E-Commerce Sites
Now that you are aware of the primary mistakes, the next question is how to use pagination in SEO for maximum benefits. In this part of our guide, we’ll tell you about the main pagination best practices to use for smooth UX and excellent SEO.
Navigation and URL Structure Optimization
Link your pages sequentially and include links from each page to the subsequent one with the help of <a href> tags. This will help bots understand the relationship between them better. Additionally, develop clear, unique, and descriptive URLs that are friendly both to users and search engines.
Use of Canonical Tags
Don’t use the first page of a paginated sequence as the only canonical page. Instead, add a separate canonical URL to every page to help bots understand their primary versions and index them accordingly.
Application of Relational Attributes
Relational attributes, such as rel="prev" and rel="next" help establish the connection between your paginated pages and help bots crawl them better.
Effective Internal Linking
In order to create smooth navigation for users, while also enhancing your rankings, you need to implement clear and logical internal linking that follows the same sequence. That is, page 1 should link to page 2, and so on. Also, it’s important to link other relevant content to help buyers and search bots find it without any issues.
Setting Up Metadata for Each Page
Unique meta tags, such as title and description, and specific H1 headings should be added to every page in your sequence. Write them thoughtfully and optimize them with your target keywords to improve rankings.
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Indexing Control
Take control over how search engines crawl your pages using robot.txt files and meta robots tags. This approach will help you ensure that unwanted pages don’t get crawled and indexed.
Mobile Adaptation
Implement responsive design to make your store friendly to all screen sizes. In terms of pagination, it’s particularly important to make sure that navigational links are visible and accessible on mobile without zooming.
Regular SEO Audit and Performance Analysis
After implementing pagination for SEO, don’t stop just there. Leverage continuous result monitoring and assessment to ensure that everything works correctly, and that search bots don’t have problems indexing and ranking your pages.
Summary
The value of pagination for SEO can be very massive. This is true, especially when it comes to organizing an online store. This form of content layout helps add clearer structure to your site and improve navigation and UX. At the same time, this technique can help you ensure smooth crawling and indexing of your pages with no eros. Respectively, it can affect your rankings in the long run.
Despite the possible benefits, this content-loading technique can also undermine the performance of your online store, negatively affect UX, and have an adverse effect on SEO. After reading this guide, you should have a better idea of how to use pagination in SEO correctly, avoiding common mistakes. Use these tips to improve conversions and make your e-commerce business grow!
Guest Author, Alina Tytarenko
About the Author
Alina Tytarenko is Outreach Team Lead at SE Ranking, a powerful and intuitive SEO platform that offers a comprehensive suite of tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink monitoring, rank tracking, and more—making it a go-to solution for digital marketers, SEO professionals, and agencies. Alina specializes in link-building strategies, outreach campaigns, SEO, and content marketing, ensuring cohesive and effective marketing efforts. She values successful teamwork as a key to achieving better results and reaching company goals. Connect with Alina on LinkedIn.