Pagination audit

How to use it

1. 1Enter the address you want to checkType or paste it into the field marked "Address to check", including the https:// at the front. Give it page 2 or later of a paginated series, not page 1 — that is where the mistakes are.
2. 2Press Check and wait a few secondsThe request runs from our server rather than from your browser, so your cache, your extensions and your login session cannot affect the answer. That is the point of it: you are seeing what an anonymous visitor sees.
3. 3Check what page 2 declares as its canonicalIt should be itself. Pointing page 2 at page 1 tells search engines that everything on page 2 is a duplicate of page 1, which quietly empties the rest of the series out of the index. This is the single most common pagination mistake and it is why the tool exists.
4. 4Look at the prev and next linksThey are no longer used as an indexing signal by Google, but they still describe the series to other clients and to people reading your markup. Broken or absent ones are reported without being called critical.
5. 5Watch for a noindex on the deeper pagesHiding pages 2 and beyond is a real strategy and also a common accident. The tool reports it; whether it is right depends on whether anything is reachable only from those pages.
6. 6Share or keep the result within 24 hoursThe result has its own link you can send to whoever needs to act on it. It is deleted 24 hours after the check ran, so save anything you need to keep — and re-run the check after a change rather than trusting an old link.

About this tool

Pagination is where indexing strategy goes quietly wrong. The commonest mistake produces no error anywhere: a template canonicalises every page of a listing to page 1, which formally declares pages 2 and beyond to be duplicates. Engines drop them, and everything reachable only through them — older articles, deep product pages — leaves the index a little at a time.

This tool examines one page of a series the way a crawler sees it: whether the URL reads as a page in a series, where its canonical points, its rel=prev/next declarations (each target actually requested), and its robots directives — because noindex on pagination is a strategy with consequences worth knowing.

Understanding the result

The headline says whether this page's declarations support or undermine its own series. "Canonical points at the series start" on page 2+ is the critical finding — each page in a series should canonicalise to itself.

The series-links table shows rel=prev/next with the verdict from requesting each target. Google retired these hints in 2019; Bing and assistive technology still read them, so they are reported as facts, not requirements.

The robots section distinguishes noindex,follow (a defensible strategy — pages stay out of results, links still crawled) from noindex,nofollow (the crawl path dies at this page).

Example

https://example.com/products?page=2

Page 2 of its series (query string)
Canonical: https://example.com/products — the series start. CRITICAL.
rel="next" ?page=3 — answers · rel="prev" /products — answers
1 critical issue: pages 2+ are declared duplicates of page 1.

Limitations

• One page is examined, not the series. Whether every page links onward correctly, with no gaps, needs every page fetched — that is the full-site crawler's job.
• Series detection is deliberately conservative: ?page=3, ?p=3, /page/3. Exotic pagination schemes (?start=40, cursor tokens) are not recognised as pagination, and the result says so rather than guessing.
• Infinite-scroll listings that build pages in JavaScript have no paginated URLs to audit here; what a crawler without JavaScript sees is exactly what this tool sees.
• Requests to private and internal addresses are refused by design.

Questions