Pagination: Pagination URL Not In Anchor Tag

URLs contained in either, or both, the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes of the page, are not found as a hyperlink in an HTML anchor element on the page itself.

Paginated pages should be linked to with regular links to allow users to click and navigate to the next page in the series.

They also allow Google to crawl from page to page, and PageRank to flow between pages in the series.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Pagination’ tab and ‘Pagination URL Not In Anchor Tag’ filter and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

Use the ‘Outlinks’ tab to identify which pagination URLs are not found as a hyperlink.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Audit rel=”next” and rel=”prev” Pagination Attributes‘.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when URLs specified in the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes are not found as hyperlinks in an HTML anchor element on the page itself.

For example:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

Has the tag:

<link rel="next" href="https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/page2/">

But https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/page2/ is not a hyperlink within the HTML of the page.

How To Fix

Ensure paginated URLs are linked to within <a> tags. This will allow them to be crawled and indexed, and pass PageRank onto any URLs they link to.