How To Create Pagination in UI That Search Engines Love

Pagination is often seen as a utilitarian element and does not get as much attention as logo design. It’s a mistake, though. Pagination is important both in terms of user experience and in terms of search engine optimization.

This guide will walk you through the best practices of pagination SEO that will help your website look good and perform well.

Understanding Pagination: The Basics

Pagination is a navigation structure that helps users browse through long lists of a website’s content without having to scroll through multiple screens. Typically, you’ll see its navigation implemented at the bottom of a page that has a list of content in the form of numbered buttons.

The most common places where you’ll see pagination are product categories and blog pages.

Source: logocreator.io

Alt: Pagination on a blog page.

What is Pagination in SEO

Above, you can see what pagination looks like to the user, but what is pagination in SEO? It’s a way to present a long list of content sorted into multiple pages.

The main benefit of pagination in SEO is that it improves loading time. Instead of having to load all the content at once and straining a user’s browser, only a set number of items load per page. This is good both for UX and SEO.

Having multiple similar pages on your website can hurt your SEO if implemented incorrectly. Pagination can be understood as duplicate content by the search engines and lead to crawling inefficiency.

Pagination SEO Best Practices

Here are the standard pagination best practices to ensure a good SEO outcome.

Create Clean URLs

The URL slugs you use for SEO-friendly pagination pages should be clear and descriptive. The perfect URL should look like this:

www.example.com/free-templates/page/2/

Everything is readable both by a human and by a search engine.

You can use query parameters like this one: www.example.com/free-templates?page=2. Google will consider them separate pages.

Avoid using fragment identifiers like this: www.example.com/free-templates#page=2. Search engines will typically disregard those.

Follow Canonical Pagination Best Practices

A canonical tag, or rel=“canonical,” tells Google that a certain page is the original and the page linking to it is a duplicate. A common misconception is that you should point a canonical tag from every pagination page to page one. This is an outdated practice. Organising pages like this can lead to Google considering them duplicates, which can hurt your SEO.

The best practice for canonical pagination cited by Google is to self-reference each page as canonical. So each page should point a rel=”canonical” to itself.

Create Robots Directives Carefully

Robots.txt and meta robots tags communicate with search engines. Robots.txt is used to block sections of the site from crawling, and meta robots tags prevent pages from being indexed. It’s best not to overuse these features because it can hurt the discovery of new content on your site by the search engines.

Having a lot of new pages created through SEO pagination can eat away at your crawling budget and prevent Google from discovering your website pages effectively and quickly. But putting pagination in noindex might prevent Google from discovering pages placed further back in the pagination list at all.

You can use a noindex directive for tags implemented through query parameters. In this setup, all these are different pages:

This can quickly create thousands of unique pages. This can lead to search engines having problems crawling your website.

If your site has pages with multiple query parameters, you can block those kinds of pages from indexing by implementing a noindex directive via a meta robots tag or in the HTTP response header. You can also block them from crawling in bulk by adding a corresponding line in robots.txt, but this means these pages can still be indexed and appear in search results.

Add Pagination Markup

Similar to rel=“canonical,” rel=”prev” and rel=”next” tags show search engines the succession of pages. Google doesn’t use them anymore, but other tools and search engines do.

It’s best to add these tags if you’re not only optimizing for Google.

Add Unique Metadata

You want to avoid duplicate content as much as possible, including in metadata like the title and description of the page. You make pagination meta tags unique in bulk by using variables with page numbers to generate them.

Reduce Depth of Paginated Content

Consider minimizing the number of pagination layers by adding more content for each page. This will reduce the number of pages overall, but might take more user resources to load them.

Enhanced Navigation

Another way to reduce the number of pages a user has to scroll is to implement faceted navigation. Give users multiple filters to narrow the list of items to what they need.

Remember that you can block those pages with filter query parameters from being crawled and indexed.

Regular SEO Audits

With hundreds of pages on the site, some mistakes inevitably seep through even the best strategy. Run a regular website health check with software like the SE Ranking Website Audit tool to find common pagination issues like crawling errors, duplicate content, and incorrectly placed canonical tags.

This will help you fix problems before they cause too much harm to your SEO and keep your website healthy.

UI Design for Effective Pagination

Now, let’s look at some strategies on how to implement pagination UI design that would be helpful to users. 

Pagination Control Placement

Since you want to stick to established web practices, put pagination at the bottom of the page, where users are likely to search for it. For longer lists, you can also add a pagination navigation bar at the top, but any other place is probably not ideal.

Visual Style of Pagination

It’s best to give users multiple ways to navigate pagination. Add both numbered buttons and buttons for navigating to the previous and next page.

Source: Amazon

Alt: A classic pagination look has multiple navigation options.

Include between three and five buttons for the pages surrounding the current one, and buttons that lead to the first and last page.

Highlight the current page to make the users’ current location clear. You can do this with a thicker border, like in the example above, or by changing the button color.

Source: Logocreator

Alt: Button color shows the current location on the site.

Optionally, add a hover effect for buttons like a color change or a preview.

Pagination like the one below is a stylistic design choice for website branding, but it’s not the best functionally.

Source: Adidas

Alt: Pagination design with no numbered buttons.

Pagination Accessibility

Websites designed for accessibility improve the browsing experience for all. Consider these additions to pagination design:

• Keyboard navigation.
• High-contrast buttons.
• Large touch targets.
• ARIA labels for screen readers.

Considerations for Infinite Scroll

Different types of pagination have their own strengths and weaknesses. A common problem in page layouts that use infinite scroll instead of pagination is content discovery by Google crawler bots. You can improve this by implementing hybrid pagination.

Serve infinite scroll to users and paginated URLs to search engines. This way, you can enjoy the benefits of pagination for SEO and retain your UX design choice..

Responsive Pagination for Mobile Users

Mobile phones have less space to work with, and this calls for several responsive design adaptations.

• Use larger mobile pagination buttons fit for tapping.
• Use common symbols instead of words in buttons.
• Use swipe gestures for pagination navigation.
• Consider giving the pagination bar a fixed position on the screen.
• Provide easy navigation to the previous page.

It’s best to serve the version of the site with these changes to both smartphone and tablet users.

Summary

Pagination is another tool in your arsenal that can help you provide users a seamless browsing experience and improve your website’s SEO.

To improve UX, focus on creating a visually appealing and accessible UI with predictable usage patterns. To improve SEO,  use canonical tags correctly, avoid duplicate content, and follow other SEO best practices from this guide.

The relatively small upfront investment in setting up pagination well will improve your website’s overall performance.

Evan is a seasoned content writer at GraphicSprings, where his passion for creativity shines through his words. With a sharp focus on logo design, branding, and entrepreneurship, Evan crafts engaging and informative content that empowers businesses to make their mark in the digital world. When he’s not writing, you’ll find him exploring new design trends or brewing his latest entrepreneurial idea.