Pagonation may result in the creation of duplicate content?

f you have an e-commerce site, for example, there is a possibility that all your product pages have the same structure and content that is similar, with the exception of a particular product’s specific details. In the Oscar Hunt example above, all the items shown in the image belong to one product category. They have similar descriptions apart from their color and pattern.

They are also likely to have similarities in their on-page SEO, for example, meta descriptions, h1 tags, anchor text, CTAs and page titles.

Search engine bots may not be able to ‘tell’ that the pages with similar content actually represent different products. They may choose to crawl some of the pages and ignore some. In worst cases, they may flag your site for duplicate content.

It dilutes ranking signals

Pagination may make a site’s ranking signals weaker. A good example here is backlinks. When sites with high site authority link to your site, it is an indicator that your site is also high authority. Such sites will pass their authority to your site. However, if your site uses pagination, this authority will be split across pages, and become ‘diluted’ as a result.

How to correctly implement pagination

Google recently [announcedin years and that they would no longer support it. This was one of the most commonly used markups to let search engine bots know that particular pages are paginated. While this has caused different reactions among SEOs, it has also emphasized the need to correctly implement pagination.

In order to ensure that your site correctly implements pagination, it is important to test how it is currently being implemented. This way, you get to know what specifically needs fixing.

Testing your site for current pagination implementation

There are different types of tools that you need in your pagination test arsenal:

Inspect Element to test for similarity in your paginated pages

Right click to access the Inspect Element. CTRL F and type in “canonical”. You should be able to see rel=”canonical” href=”the url of the current page”