Pagination in E‑commerce
Product catalogue pagination. Managing many category pages with canonical.
On this page
Problems with paginationManagement strategiesRecommended approach (2025)Infinite scroll vs paginationNoindex for deep pagesIn brief
Pagination in e‑commerce is the splitting of product lists into sequential pages. In online stores, pagination creates thousands of similar pages (category + page number), leading to duplicate content and diluted link equity. A proper indexing strategy is required.
Problems with pagination
- Duplicate content — pages are very similar (differ only in product order).
- Diluted link equity — link weight spreads across many pages.
- Indexing — Google may index thousands of low‑value pages, wasting crawl budget.
Management strategies
- rel=«next»/«prev» — obsolete, ignored by Google.
- Canonical to page=1 — not recommended; deep pages will be de‑indexed.
- Self‑referencing canonical — each paginated page points to itself (recommended).
- View All — a 'show all' page for categories with a small number of products (≤200).
Recommended approach (2025)
HTML
<!-- Each paginated page uses self‑referencing canonical -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/shoes/?page=2" />
<!-- Unique Title and Description -->
<title>Nike Sneakers — Page 2 | Store</title>
<meta name="description" content="Nike sneakers — page 2 of 10. Choose from 240 models." />Infinite scroll vs pagination
- Pagination — easier for SEO; each page has a static URL.
- Infinite scroll — modern UX, but requires History API to generate unique URLs on load. Without API, the bot sees only the first batch of products.
Noindex for deep pages
PHP
// Pages 10+ usually have no search traffic
if ($page >= 10) {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">';
}Do not canonical all paginated pages to page=1 — this will drop pages 2,3,… from the index. Products on those pages will not be found.
FAQ
Common questions
Self‑referencing canonical + unique Titles for pages 2–5, noindex for pages 10+. Use filtering to reduce the total number of combinations.
A page that shows all products in a category without pagination. Suitable for categories with ≤200 products. Set canonical from paginated pages to View All.
If you have 1000 categories × 20 paginated pages = 20,000 pages. Bots may waste budget on them instead of important pages. Use noindex for deep pages to reduce the load.
Direct contacts
Discuss your project?
Share your goals and website context — I will suggest a practical next step.