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canonical.paginated-to-first

WarningSEO audit

Page 2 or later of a paginated series (?page=2, /page/2/) names the first page as its canonical, so search engines may drop it and miss the items only it links to.

What to change

Give each page of the series a canonical that names its own URL (?page=2 names ?page=2), and link the pages to each other with plain <a href> links. Google advises against making the first page the canonical of the series.

The documentation on developers.google.com

A finding of this rule on a page carries the exact edits for that page: the markup it quotes, and what to write instead.

When it runs

Runs on every SEO audit: of a page, a crawl, a build directory or HTML. A warning is a problem that costs a page ranking, clicks or citations. Each finding takes 5 points off the page's score.

The severity here is the rule's usual one: a finding can be raised or lowered when the page gives a reason.

Run it, or skip it

Check a page for this rule alone, after a fix for instance:

npx @rivi-software/agentic-seo-check audit https://example.com --rule canonical.paginated-to-first

Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_audit_page:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "rules": [
    "canonical.paginated-to-first"
  ]
}

To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable canonical.paginated-to-first on the command, or disableRules: ["canonical.paginated-to-first"] to a tool.

All 8 rules