Reversed a bad noindex-on-pagination call, recovered 1,100 products

Reversed a bad noindex-on-pagination call, recovered 1,100 products

Inherited a store where a previous agency had noindexed every ?page=2+. Sounds clean, right? Problem: half the product catalog was ONLY reachable through paginated category pages. Those products were orphaned out of the index.

Fix:
— Removed noindex from paginated pages
— Let page 2+ stay indexable and crawlable (self-canonical, not canonical-to-page-1)
— Added a flat HTML product index as a crawl backstop

6 weeks: 1,100 products re-entered the index. Long-tail product queries went from ~30 clicks/day to ~210.

Never noindex pagination unless you're 100% sure deeper products are linked some other way. Check first.