rel='prev' / rel='next' Pagination No Longer Supported

What’s actually happening

Your paginated archive (?page=2, ?page=3 …) still carries rel=prev/rel=next in the head, and you're assuming Google reads it to treat the series as one set and float page 1 to the top. It doesn't. Google confirmed in 2019 it had already dropped these as an indexing signal years earlier. So each paginated URL stands on its own — and if pages 2+ are thin lists of links with near-identical titles and meta, they sit in the index competing as low-value duplicates of page 1.

Common causes

• Carrying over a pre-2019 pagination pattern that assumed Google consolidated the series via rel=next/prev.
• An SEO plugin or framework that still injects rel=prev/next by default, giving a false sense the pagination is 'handled'.
• Paginated pages with duplicated <title>/meta description and no self-canonical, so they read as thin duplicates once Google treats each independently.
• A canonical on page 2+ pointing back at page 1 — which hides the deeper pages' content (and their links to products/articles) from the index entirely.
• Confusing rel=next/prev (an indexing hint Google ignores) with the still-valid browser feature — they're unrelated now.

How to fix it

1. Stop relying on rel=next/prev to consolidateTreat the tags as inert for Google. You can leave them (Bing and accessibility tools still read them, and they cause no harm) or remove them — but either way, don't count on them to merge a series. The decision that matters is how each paginated URL behaves on its own.
2. Self-canonical each paginated pagePut a self-referencing rel=canonical on every page in the series: ?page=2 canonicals to ?page=2, not to page 1. Canonicalizing deeper pages to page 1 is the common mistake — it tells Google to ignore those pages, so the items only linked from page 3+ never get discovered.
3. Make each page individually useful and distinctDifferentiate titles and meta ('Blog — Page 2'), keep the items crawlable as real <a href> links, and make sure every important destination is reachable within a few clicks. Component pages should earn their place, not duplicate page 1.
4. Keep paginated URLs crawlableDon't noindex page 2+ and don't block ?page= in robots.txt as a reflex — that can strand the only crawl path to deeper content. If a parameter genuinely creates duplicates, canonicalize it rather than blocking it.
5. Offer a view-all where it fitsFor a series short enough to load fast, a single 'view all' page (with paginated pages canonicalizing to it) is the cleanest consolidation Google actually honors. Skip it if it would make the page slow.