About Pagination

Hi there!

I am aware, and I urge you to follow the recommendations found here:
https://searchengineland.com/google-apologizes-for-relnext-prev-mixup-314494

To summarize: Other search engines still rely on the link relationship tags. So, I don’t recommend removing them.

Google didn’t exclude the possibility of reintroducing this feature. It would be smart of them to do so, as this saves them processing time and money with the ever-increasing web.

As for applying noindex to paginated pages: Yes, I recommend using this feature.

Now, although Google doesn’t use the link relationship tags, they do recognize pagination. I can’t comment on how they achieve this, but I think they can assert that /some-archive/2/ is the second page of /some-archive/ as there’s a number attached.

Alternatively, they can recognize the inclusion and exclusion of pagination links, but getting your head around that is quite a challenge. Me putting that into words is even more of a challenge, so I’m not even going to try 😀

Here’s my final take on this: If you don’t spot paginated links of your site in the search results, don’t do anything. Otherwise, use the default settings brought by The SEO Framework regarding this.