Technical fix guide
Pagination Markup or Navigation Issues
Paginated content lacks proper rel="next"/rel="prev" hints or accessible pagination navigation, making it harder for search engines to discover all pages.
Issue ID: TECH-PAGINATION-001
Severity: minor
Impact: Med
Effort: M
Use this article when
- You need deeper remediation guidance than the issue card can show.
- You want CMS-specific steps before handing the fix to a developer.
- You want a repeatable re-check path after shipping the change.
What this issue is
Paginated content lacks proper rel="next"/rel="prev" hints or accessible pagination navigation, making it harder for search engines to discover all pages.
Why it matters
Paginated content lacks proper rel="next"/rel="prev" hints or accessible pagination navigation, making it harder for search engines to discover all pages. This affects crawlability, rendering, and whether the site can be interpreted correctly by search engines.
How we detect it
- FreeSiteAudit flags this issue when the rule for TECH-PAGINATION-001 fails and the page evidence points to Head metadata.
- You can usually confirm this by checking the page source or the relevant page settings inside your CMS.
Evidence examples
Check the affected page source, rendered output, or relevant CMS setting to confirm the missing or incorrect element.
How to fix it
- 1Add rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements in <head> for paginated sequences
- 2Ensure each paginated page has a self-referencing canonical
- 3Provide a visible pagination nav with links to all pages or "View All"
How to re-check it
- Check <head> for rel="next"/"prev" on paginated pages
Related tools
This issue is best verified with the full FreeSiteAudit crawl rather than a single-point mini tool.