Splitting information across several pages increases the website’s usability . It’s also vital to implement pagination correctly, as this determines whether your important content will be indexed . Both the website’s usability and indexing directly affect its search engine visibility.
Let’s take a closer look at these factors.
Website usability
Search engines strive to show the most relevant and informative results at the top of SERPs and have many criteria for evaluating the website’s usability, as well as its content quality. Pagination affects:
- Behavioral factors
One of the indirect signs of content quality is the time users spend on the site. The more convenient it is for users to move between paginated content, the more time they spend on your site.
- Navigation
Website pagination makes it easier for users to find the information they are looking for. Users immediately understand the site structure and can get to the desired page in a single click.
- Page experience
According to Google , pagination can help you improve page performance (which is a Google Search ranking signal). And here’s why. Paginated pages load faster than all results at once. Plus, you improve backend performance by reducing the volume of content retrieved from databases.
Crawling and indexing
If you want paginated content to appear on SERPs, think about how bots crawl and index pages:
- Unique content
Google must ensure that all site pages are completely unique: duplicate content poses indexing problems. Crawlers perceive paginated pages as separate URLs. At the same time, it is very likely that these pages may contain similar or identical content.
- Crawling budget
The search engine bot has an allowance for how many pages it can crawl during a single visit to the site. While Google bots are busy crawling numerous pagination pages, they will not be visiting other pages, probably more important URLs. As a result, important content may be indexed later or not indexed at all.
