I think you may have skipped over the image I posted above… Here’s the text:
John Mueller commented, “We don’t treat pagination differently. We treat them as normal pages.”
Meaning paginated pages are not recognized by Google as a series of pages consolidated into one piece of content as they previously advised. Every paginated page is eligible to compete against the root page for ranking.
To encourage Google to return the root page in the SERPs and prevent “Duplicate meta descriptions” or “Duplicate title tags” warnings in Google Search Console, make an easy modification to your code.
If the root page has the formula:
The successive paginated pages could have the formula:
These paginated URL page titles and meta description are purposefully suboptimal to dissuade Google from displaying these results, rather than the root page.
If even with such modifications, paginated pages are ranking in the SERPs, try other traditional on-page SEO tactics such as:
- De-optimize paginated page H1 tags.
- Add useful on-page text to the root page, but not paginated pages.
- Add a category image with an optimized file name and alt tag to the root page, but not paginated pages.
