SEO Advice for Web Pages With Infinite Scrolling Pagination

You might have come across infinite scrolling pagination in websites like Pinterest, Twitter and Eluthu.

It is nothing but a web-design technique that loads content continuously as the user scrolls down the page, eliminating the need for pagination.

This type of pagination is not recommended for websites with goal-oriented finding tasks, where people look on to locate specific content or compare options.

Considering search engine point of view, with infinite scrolling crawlers cannot able to access all the links / individual items in your website. This would affect your search results.

Here are 10 SEO tips on how to use the infinite scroll pagination:

1) Divide your infinite-scroll page content into component pages that can be accessed when JavaScript is disabled.

2) Determine how much content to include on each page.

3) Divide content so that there is no overlap between component pages in the series.

4) Structure URLs for infinite scroll search engine processing.

5) Be sure the URL shows conceptually the same content two weeks from now. Avoid relative-time based URL parameters:
example.com/category/page.php?name=fun-items&days-ago=3

6) Create parameters that can surface valuable content to searchers. Avoid non-searcher valuable parameters as the primary method to access content:
example.com/fun-places?radius=5&lat=40.71&long=-73.40

7) Configure pagination with each component page containing rel=next and rel=prev values in the .

Implement replaceState/pushState on the infinite scroll page.

9) Check that page values adjust as the user scrolls up or down.

10) Verify that pages that are out-of-bounds in the series return a 404 response.

You can see this type of behavior in action in the infinite scroll with pagination demo here at http://scrollsample.appspot.com/items?page=15 created by Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller.

The demo covers all individual items by crawlers. Each item is listed only once in the paginated series without duplication.

This infinite scrolling saves people mechanics of clicking on webpages in browsing tasks, but is not a good choice for all kind of websites.