Handling deep pagination without starving your crawl

Infinite-scroll and 200-page archives generate crawl paths to nowhere. Plan them:

— Map how deep your pagination goes. /page/200 with 5 internal links each is a crawl maze.
— Keep paginated pages crawlable and self-canonical — do NOT canonical page 2+ to page 1 (that hides the linked items).
— Make sure items on deep pages are ALSO reachable via categories/hubs, so crawl doesn't depend on the pagination chain.
— Drop rel=prev/next as a crawl strategy — Google stopped using it years ago and said so.
— For truly infinite feeds, provide a paginated, linked fallback Googlebot can actually walk.

Here's the thing: Google announced it ignores rel=prev/next for indexing. If your pagination plan relies on it, the plan is already dead.

Deep items need a second path to them. Don't make Googlebot walk 200 pages to find page 200's content.