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Site Migration - Pagination
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Hi,
We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example:
Old urls:
www.example.com/technology/tvs (main category of TVs & also page 1)
** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 ** ( page 2 of TVs)
New urls:
**www.example.com/soundvision/tvs **(main category of TVs & also page 1)
**www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2 **(page 2 of tvs)
Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page).
I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
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It would be the best you can do in that situation
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Thank you for the reply.
Would redirecting paginated content to paginated content be ok if the products are not the same per each page(new vs old) ? For example old page 2 contains different tvs than the new page 2 (different rules of ordering are applied to our new website).
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Google doesn't use rel=prev/next any more: https://searchengineland.com/google-no-longer-supports-relnext-prev-314319 - so forget about it unless you think it has benefits for crawlers other than Google
I would do the redirects properly, so redirect the old paginated URLs to the same page (paginated URL) on the new site
Google usually doesn't list paginated content but it can do sometimes. A good example of this is when you type really specific queries into Google and find that Google is linking to a topic on a forum. Quite often you'll see Google linking to paginated content there. Why? Because that specific page of the topic, is the part where the thread really gets answered (or gets its best insight). Maybe some people link to that page of that thread specifically, and it becomes more popular than the first page
In those situations, Google's usual view (that first page should be canonical) gets overridden. So whilst Google 'usually' makes the first page canonical, sometimes Google can change its mind if popularity metrics suggest a different paginated URL should be canonical instead
As such, you don't need rel=prev/next (which Google doesn't even use) and you don't need to put canonical tags on paginated content pointing to the parent (which might disable Google from overriding the default canonical URL). I would properly redirect all the old paginated URLs, to all the new ones - so Google doesn't get confused
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