The discussion revolves around the high Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) issue with paginated URLs (?page=n) affecting SEO. MichaIng and aest have reported this issue, with Google Search Console flagging the URLs as having high CLS. A fix has been implemented by nat and is available on GitHub (https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/25034). The fix calculates the scroll position correctly, eliminating the jump previously experienced. An example on meta (https://meta.discourse.org/t/111143?page=3) demonstrates the improvement.
Search engines crawl the paginated URLs on large topics, but face a high Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) with them.
Opening them in browser, ?page=2 shows reply 21 correctly aligned at first, but after a little moment it jumps up to somewhere between replies 19 and 21. Probably this can be omitted to improve SEO and user experience when pagination is used.
Thanks for your patience yall! This was pretty hard to reproduce. I’ll set a timer for a month and we can revisit to confirm if this fixes the issue – feeels like it should.
EDIT:
I just confirmed the fix is on meta. An example topic would be https://meta.discourse.org/t/111143?page=3. Previously, it would jump when the page is determining the scroll position.
With the fix, the scroll position is calculated correctly and we won’t see the jump.