Imagine there is a large scale website and we are going to release pagination on category listing pages.
in order to optimize crawl budget and link equity among paginated pages, what is the best strategy?
Noindexing paginated pages, canonicalizing paginated pages to the first page, etc. ?
I must partly disagree with Antonio's comment above. In fact, there are at least one risks in using the "noindex" for paginated lists:
the "noindex" means that you are eliminating the page from the index of Google, which means that it will start not to consider it for crawling hence will crawl less and less, which means that less and less will follow the items listed in the noindex pages.
Hi Amir,
Please find in this link the Google Guidelines about pagination:https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/ecommerce/pagination-and-incremental-page-loading
Following my experience, the best option is:
Include a meta robots tag with the value “noindex, follow” in the pagination pages (I.e. https://mydomain.com/category?page=2. https://mydomain.com/category/page=3) Important! Only in the second, third, etc pagination pages not in the first one. The value “follow” is really important to assure that the robot will crawl all your pagination pages to discover all the items included on them.
Include a meta robots tag with the value “index, follow” in the first page (usually this page would not have any parameter to indicate pagination, I.e. https://mydomain.com/category)
Introduce a meta canonical tag Pointing to itself (auto-reference canonical tag). By this way you will maintain all the positive signals in the first page of the pagination (that is marked as index, follow) and negative signals in the next pages (markets as noindex, follow).
Hope it could help you