Q: 'We still use rel=next/prev. Now that Google ignores it, do we need to change anything?'

Q: 'We still use rel=next/prev. Now that Google ignores it, do we need to change anything?'

Short answer: Keep it for other engines, but fix how page 2+ self-canonicalizes — that's what mattered in one audit.

The longer version: A toy retailer kept rel=next/prev (harmless) but had every paginated page canonicalizing to page 1. That told Google 'pages 2-10 are duplicates of page 1', so deeper products on those pages went uncrawled and unindexed — about 3,000 SKUs invisible. They switched each paginated page to self-reference its own canonical, kept page 1 as the category landing target, and ensured products on every page had crawlable links. Within two months, indexed product count rose by ~2,800 and long-tail product queries grew 27%. The rel=next/prev wasn't the issue; the bad canonical was.

Rule of thumb: Paginated pages should canonicalize to themselves, not page 1. Otherwise you're telling Google to ignore everything past page one.

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