They obsessed over rel=next/prev for a year. Google dropped support in 2019.

They obsessed over rel=next/prev for a year. Google dropped support in 2019.

Classic case of optimizing a ghost. An ecommerce team spent months perfecting rel="next" and rel="prev" across thousands of paginated category pages, convinced it was consolidating crawl signals.

Google announced in 2019 it hadn't used those for indexing in years. The markup did literally nothing.

What they found when they audited the actual problem: page 2 through page 80 of every category had unique, crawlable URLs with thin overlapping content — 180,000 of them soaking up crawl.

The real fix was canonicalizing deep pagination to a view-all where feasible and ensuring products were reachable from category, not just deep pages. Crawl on pagination dropped 64%; product recrawl rose.

Here's the thing — you were maintaining markup Google ignores.

Audit what Google actually does, not what a 2014 blog post said.