Still relying on rel=next/prev

Still relying on rel=next/prev

"We mark up pagination with rel=next/prev so Google understands the series."

Google stopped using that in 2019.

They announced they hadn't used rel=next/prev for indexing in years — and people are still shipping it as their entire pagination strategy, then wondering why deep pages don't get crawled or why page 2+ products never index.

Here's what actually happens: the markup does nothing, so the real failure underneath stays unsolved — paginated pages with thin, near-duplicate content, canonicals pointing every page back to page one (which deindexes pages 2+ and the products only listed there), and no other path for crawlers to reach deep items.

Fix: don't lean on a dead signal. Make each paginated page self-canonical and crawlable, ensure products are reachable from somewhere other than deep pagination (category links, sitemaps), and keep the on-page content meaningful per page. Keep rel=next/prev if you want — for browsers — but it's not an SEO plan.