Retire legacy rel=next/rel=prev pagination markup and adopt current alternatives
domain: pagination · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Confirm current status: Google stopped using rel=next/rel=prev as an indexing/ranking signal (announced March 2019); the tags are inert for Google today, though harmless if left in place
Remove any internal logic that assumes Google uses rel=next/prev to understand series relationships
Give each paginated page (page 2, page 3, etc.) a self-referencing canonical rather than canonicalizing every page back to page 1, so each page can be indexed on its own
Ensure strong, crawlable internal linking between paginated pages (numbered links, not just a JS-only "next" button) so Googlebot can discover the full series
Where feasible and performant, offer a "view all" page as an alternative consolidated entry point for the full series
Known gotchas
Canonicalizing all paginated pages to page 1 (a once-common pattern) can cause Google to drop page 2+ from the index entirely, since it signals those pages aren't meant to stand alone
Leaving rel=next/prev in place isn't harmful, but don't rely on it as your only pagination signal — verify per-engine if pagination SEO matters across search engines other than Google
JS-only "next page" interactions without real crawlable hrefs can hide later pages from Googlebot regardless of what pagination markup you use
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