Why it matters
Google's crawlers do not click "next" buttons, and rel=next and rel=prev are no longer used. Pointing the canonical of page 2 and later at page 1 is incorrect because the pages are not duplicates, and items listed only on later pages may never be indexed. A remark at Search Central Live that a canonical to page 1 can sometimes make sense was hedged; the documented rule stands.
How to meet it
Use ?page=n (or /page/n/) URLs, with page 1 at the clean listing URL. Each page carries a self-referencing canonical and <a href> links to the next page and back to page 1, ideally also to nearby pages; titles and descriptions may stay the same across the series, so a page number in the title is optional. Never put page numbers in # fragments. Keep sort and filter variants out of the crawl (DEV-URL-08).
How to test it
For pages 1 to 3 of a listing, curl the HTML: the canonical is self-referencing and the next-page <a href> is present without JavaScript. URL Inspection shows later pages as indexable.
How Regensbot covers it
Decided from one URL.
An audit reads the response, the headers, the HTML, robots.txt, the sitemaps and the structured data, and the finding shows the evidence it saw.
Sources
Google documents02
- 01Pagination, incremental page loading, and their impact on Google SearchGoogle Search Central (opens in a new tab)
- 025 common mistakes with rel=canonicalSearch Central blog (8 April 2013) (opens in a new tab)
Claims in the knowledge base06
- D1-C115SourceDay 1, session not recordedGoogle's documentation
- D2-C395SourceHandling web duplicationGoogle's documentation
- D2-C394n/aHandling web duplicationThe author's interpretation
- D2-C393UndocumentedHandling web duplicationSaid on stage
- D1-C114ConsistentQ&ASaid on stage
- D2-C832SourceHandling web duplicationGoogle's documentation
Claim IDs refer to the Search Central Live 2026 knowledge base. The knowledge base (opens in a new tab)
- Consistent
- Google's documentation supports it without stating it.
- Undocumented
- Said or shown at the event, not in the documentation.
- Source
- The claim is the cited document itself.
- n/a
- Nothing to verify: a quotation, framing, opinion or analysis.