Pagination vs Infinite Scroll: What’s Best for SEO?

If your site’s packed with products, blog posts, or any kind of long content list, then you need a way to break things up — whether that’s pagination, filters, or infinite scroll. But if you don’t set these up properly, they can quietly mess with your SEO on the back end.

The biggest hurdle to this is making sure search engines can still find everything, without getting stuck crawling loads of duplicate pages or burning through your crawl budget on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Done right, these tools help your users and keep Google happy, too.

Pagination Best Practices

Every page in a paginated series should be crawlable and actually worth indexing. “Noindex” tags should only ever go on something that’s really, genuinely pointless!

Make sure each page clearly links to the next one and the previous one - and ideally, to key points in the series. Don’t rely on weird URL changes based on sessions or user behaviour either. Keep those URLs clean and consistent.

And sometimes? A single “View All” page might be better than splitting the content into loads of paginated pages. Test what works best.

Infinite Scroll Considerations

Infinite scroll might look slick. But it’s a nightmare for SEO if not handled right.

Search engines won’t wait around while your JavaScript loads more content in the background. If the only way to access that content is scrolling endlessly, Google might never see it.

So make sure there’s a crawlable backup, like numbered links to each section of content, or a "load more" button that adds proper URLs as it goes. You can also do a hybrid setup: smooth scroll for users and hard links for the backend bots.

Filter and Faceted Navigation

If you’ve got filter options like colour, price, or size, then be very careful about how they’re structured.

You don’t want Google crawling 10,000 versions of your jeans page because someone toggled four filters. That’s a waste of resources.

Use canonical tags to point filtered pages back to the main category page when they don’t offer anything unique. If it’s just narrowing down a list, not showing totally new and useful info, don’t let it get indexed.