Pagination
Pagination splits long lists across numbered pages, which is common in blog archives, category listings and search results. Handled badly it buries content at extreme crawl depth, creates near-duplicate pages and wastes a large share of your available crawl budget.
Why it matters for your rankings
Pagination is where large sites quietly lose their long tail. Item number four hundred sits on page twenty, which is effectively invisible to both crawlers and users no matter how good the item is.
The historical advice made things worse. Google stopped using rel=next and rel=prev in 2019 without most sites noticing, so a lot of implementations are still built around a signal nothing reads. Canonicalising every paginated page to page one is worse still, because it tells Google the deeper pages do not exist and their items never get discovered. The workable approach is to let each paginated page self-canonicalise and be indexable, while reducing how many pages exist through sensible page sizes and filtered entry points.
How to check it on your site
Check the canonical on page two
It should point at itself, not at page one. Canonicalising to page one hides everything beyond it.
Confirm paginated pages are crawlable
Pagination links must be real anchors with href attributes, not JavaScript-driven buttons.
Measure the depth
Crawl the site and check how deep the last page of your largest listing sits. Beyond five clicks is a problem.
Reduce the page count
Larger page sizes and filtered category entry points cut depth more effectively than any markup change.