Removing rogue self-canonical on paginated pages: +18% indexed listings

Removing rogue self-canonical on paginated pages: +18% indexed listings

Forum with 14,700 thread-list pages. Every page 2..N canonicalized to page 1.

Reachable-only-via-deep-pages threads ▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░ 52%

Result: half the threads were orphaned behind pagination Google treated as duplicate.

Fix: self-referencing canonical on each paginated page, real prev/next link context, sitemap entries for deep threads.

Delta over 6 weeks:
— Indexed threads: 9,100 → 12,750 (↑18.0% of total set)
— Discovered-not-crawled: 31% → 9%
— Median crawl interval on page 3+: 22d → 7d

So what: pointing pagination at page 1 hides everything page 1 links to. The canonical wasn't deduping — it was deleting reachability.