Q: We canonicaled all paginated pages to page 1 during a restructure — did it cost us?

Q: We canonicaled all paginated pages to page 1 during a restructure — did it cost us?

Subtle one, and it bites category-heavy sites.

Short answer: yes — deep products fell out of the index.

Long answer: a catalog restructure set every paginated page (?page=2, 3, 4…) to canonical back to page 1, thinking it'd consolidate. Instead Google stopped indexing products only reachable on later pages — about 4,000 items vanished from the index over a month, and traffic to those products dropped 40%.

We removed the page-1 canonical, let each paginated page self-canonical, and ensured products were also linked from sitemaps. Indexing recovered ~3,500 of the 4,000 over 6 weeks.

Next step: paginated pages should self-canonicalize, not point to page 1 — otherwise Google can't reach anything past the first page of a list.