Rel=Next/Prev Pagination SEO: Keep, Remove, or Fix Each Series

Paginated pages are easy to forget.

An ecommerce category, long article or forum thread quietly grows extra URLs.

Nobody revisits how those pages signal their relationship to search engines.

The rel="next" and rel="prev" attributes were built for that job.

Their value has changed, and many sites still carry broken implementations.

This article covers what those attributes do today and how to audit a paginated series.

It also helps you decide page by page whether to keep, remove or fix the markup.

What rel=next and rel=prev actually do

The rel="next" and rel="prev" attributes sit in the head of a paginated page.

They indicate relationships between component URLs in a series to search engines.

They help consolidate indexing properties across the sequence and point users and crawlers to the most relevant URL within it, according to Screaming Frog’s audit tutorial.

They are commonly used on ecommerce category pages that display many products across multiple URLs, articles broken into shorter pieces, and forum threads.

The concept is simple, but incorrect implementation is extremely common, the same tutorial notes.

That matters because a broken attribute is worse than no attribute: it can point crawlers at a redirect, an error page, or a URL that no longer exists.

Does Google still use rel=next and rel=prev?

No.

Google announced on 21 March 2019 that it had not used rel=“next” and rel=“prev” in indexing for a long time.

If your only goal were Google indexing, the attributes would be inert.

However, other search engines still use them.

Bing, which also powers Yahoo, uses the attributes as a hint for discovery and understanding site structure, per the Screaming Frog tutorial.

Does rel next prev still matter for SEO?

For Google, no.

For Bing-powered discovery and the structural hygiene it forces you to check, often yes.

That distinction should drive your decision.

Removing the attributes is not harmful to Google indexing, but keeping a correct implementation costs little and preserves a hint that some crawlers still read.

Keeping a broken implementation is the one option with real downside.

Why crawlable links matter more than the attributes

Whatever you decide about rel=“next” and rel=“prev”, the pagination itself must be reachable through ordinary HTML links.

Google's link best practices state that Google can generally only crawl a link if it is an anchor element with an href attribute.

It cannot reliably extract URLs from elements without href or from script-event pseudo-links.

In practice this means every page in a series should link to the next page with a real anchor tag.

Screaming Frog's tutorial notes that paginated pages should use regular links.

That lets users click through, Google crawl page to page, and PageRank flow between pages.

Google’s own Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller has recommended proper HTML links for pagination in a Webmaster Central Hangout.

So if your pagination loads the next set of products only through JavaScript without anchor hrefs, fixing that is a higher priority than any decision about the rel attributes.

How to audit pagination attributes

A crawler-based audit turns an abstract question into a concrete list.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider can crawl and report on pagination attributes; the tutorial describes the following workflow.

1. Enable pagination crawling. Under Configuration, select Crawl and Store Pagination. By default this is disabled; enabling it means URLs referenced in rel=“next” and rel=“prev” attributes are crawled, extracted and reported. This only changes the crawl if those pages are not already linked with regular anchor tags.
2. Crawl the site. Enter the website URL and start the crawl, then wait for it to complete.
3. Review the Pagination tab. It shows all URLs found in the crawl, with the URLs referenced in rel=“next” and rel=“prev” attributes in individual columns, plus filters that surface common problems.
4. Run crawl analysis. Two filters, Unlinked Pagination URLs and Pagination Loop, require post-crawl analysis to populate. If you have configured crawl analysis before, check that Pagination is ticked under Crawl Analysis Configure.
5. Work through the populated filters.

The filters map directly onto the decisions you need to make.

The tutorial describes them as follows:

• Contains Pagination flags any URL with a rel=“next” and/or rel=“prev” attribute, identifying it as part of a series.
• First Page flags URLs with only rel=“next”, the start of a series. Scroll through and confirm these sit on the correct parent pages.
• Paginated 2+ Pages flags URLs carrying rel=“prev”, meaning they are not the first page. Confirm only genuine paginated pages appear here.
• Pagination URL Not In Anchor Tag flags pages where the URL in a rel attribute is not also a normal hyperlink on the page. This is the crawlability problem described above.
• Non-200 Pagination URL flags attribute URLs that do not respond with a 200 OK status, including URLs blocked by robots.txt, redirects, client errors and server errors. The tutorial treats these as errors that search engines ignore, so the attributes point at nothing useful.

Two more filters deserve attention because they catch the failures people rarely spot by hand.

Unlinked Pagination URLs identifies series pages that no regular anchor link reaches, meaning crawlers may only find them through the attributes, if at all.

Pagination Loop identifies series where the next and prev references circle back on themselves, a chain that never terminates cleanly.

Keep, remove, or fix: deciding per series

Treat each paginated series as its own decision rather than applying one rule site-wide.

A three-step decision sequence keeps this manageable.

Step one: fix errors first, regardless of the keep-or-remove choice

If the audit shows non-200 attribute URLs, pagination not in anchor tags, or loops, those are defects in the series itself.

Fixing them benefits users and all crawlers whether or not you keep the markup.

A rel=“next” pointing at a redirect helps nobody; a category page whose later pages are unreachable by normal links loses crawl paths that Google explicitly relies on.

Step two: for a clean series, weigh the marginal value of the attributes

If the series is correctly implemented, the attributes are doing no harm and still serve as a discovery and structure hint for Bing-powered engines.

Keeping them is a low-cost default.

Removing them simplifies templates and removes a maintenance surface, and Google indexing is unaffected.

There is no documented SEO penalty for either choice on a clean series, so the tiebreaker is operational.

Keep the markup if your team maintains it and audits show it stays correct.

If it was half-removed years ago and nobody owns it, finishing the removal is more honest.

Step three: fix the series, not just the attributes

Most pagination problems are content and architecture problems wearing markup clothing.

A category paginated into many thin pages may serve users better with better filtering or larger page sizes.

That is a design decision with tradeoffs in page weight and speed, not an attribute fix.

The attributes should reflect a series that makes sense; they cannot create one.

A worked audit example

Consider an online retailer’s “running shoes” category split across several pages.

The audit shows the first page carries only rel="next" and later pages carry rel="prev".

One mid-series page's rel="next" points at a URL that now redirects to the category root after a replatform.

The Non-200 filter catches the redirect.

The fix is to update the attribute, and the ordinary next-page link, to point at the current live URL.

The decision on the attributes can wait; the broken reference cannot.

It misdirects any crawler that still honours the hint and signals a poorly maintained series.

Contrast that with a blog that split one long guide into four pages years ago, where a redesign dropped the rel attributes from the template entirely.

The pages still link to each other with normal anchors, so crawlability is intact and Google indexing never depended on the attributes.

Here the choice is genuinely optional: reinstate the markup for Bing’s benefit, or leave the series as plain linked pages.

Common implementation mistakes to check

• Attributes pointing at redirected, blocked or erroring URLs rather than live 200 pages.
• Next and prev URLs that exist only in the attributes, not as clickable anchor links on the page.
• First pages that incorrectly carry rel=“prev”, or mid-series pages missing it.
• Loops where a series references itself in a circle.
• Series pages reachable only through the attributes, with no regular links from anywhere on the site.

Each of these is observable in a crawl, which is why an audit beats spot-checking a handful of pages by hand.

Turning the audit into an operating routine

For teams coordinating marketing and sales across existing tools, pagination hygiene fits the pattern of other technical SEO upkeep.

It degrades silently during replatforms, template changes and catalog growth.

Schedule a pagination crawl after major site changes and alongside periodic technical audits.

Route the filter outputs, especially Non-200 and Pagination Loop, into your normal fix queue.

The attributes themselves are a small piece of the picture.

The durable value of auditing them is the process itself.

It forces you to confirm every paginated page is linked, live and correctly sequenced, which is what users and search engines need.

Keep rel="next" and rel="prev" only where the series is clean and someone owns it.

Remove it where it is abandoned.

Always fix broken links, erroring attribute URLs and loops first, whatever markup you choose.

For a wider view of where technical fixes fit into a demand programme, see these examples.

Source references: www.screamingfrog.co.uk; developers.google.com.

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