Pagination: Non-Indexable

The paginated URL is non-indexable.

Generally they should all be indexable, unless there is a ‘view-all’ page set, or there are extra parameters on pagination URLs, and they require canonicalising to a single URL.

One of the most common mistakes is canonicalising page 2+ paginated pages to the first page in a series.

Google recommend against this implementation because the component pages don’t actually contain duplicate content.

Another common mistake is using ‘noindex’, which can mean Google drops paginated URLs from the index completely and stops following outlinks from those pages, which can be a problem for the products on those pages.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Pagination’ tab and ‘Non-Indexable’ filter, and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

View the ‘Indexability Status’ column to identify quickly why the page is non-indexable.

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

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when paginated URLs are non-indexable.

For example:

https://www.example.com/football-boots/page2/

Has rel=”next” and rel=”next” attributes correctly set up:

<link rel="prev" href="https://www.example.com/football-boots/">
<link rel="next" href="https://www.example.com/football-boots/page3/">

However, the page is non-indexable as it has a canonical link element to the first page in the series:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/football-boots/">

How To Fix

Ensure paginated URLs are to canonical, indexable pages – so they can be crawled and indexed.