Pagination new pages vs parameters

[K-WINTER]

I'm working on a site that currently handles pagination like this

cars-page?p=1 cars-page?p=2

In webmaster tools I can then tell ?p= designates pagination

However I have a plugin I want to add to fix other seo issues, among those it adds rel="prev" rel="next" and it modifies the pagination to this

cars-page-1.html cars-page2.html

Notice I lost the parameter here and now  each page is a different page url, pagination is no longer a parameter. I will not longer be able to specify the pagination parameter in webmaster tools. Would this confuse google as the pagination is no longer a parameter and there will now be multiple urls instead of one page with parameters?

My gut says this would be bad, as I haven't seen this approach often on ecommerce site, but I wanted to see what the community thought?

[K-WINTER]

Thank you for the replies!

It is a strange plug-in, but the newest version of Magento Enterprise 2.2.3 and all 2.1 and 2.2 aren't any better. It's really messed up how they handle pagination, whomever coded Magento really didn't understand how it's supposed to work and didn't read the Google documentation. The plugin is better but not perfect either.

I agree keeping the current structure would be better, I've reached out to the developer to see if they're willing to make a change to the plug-in to keep the original structure. In testing I found it doesn't 301 the old URLs to the new URLs if you switch over so  that's really going to create some issues I feel like

[KristinaKledzik]

What a weird plugin!

Like Gaston said, Google can deal with pagination that's on separate pages, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a period where they crawled/indexed too many pages.

Is there an option in your plugin to keep things the way they are?

[GastonRiera]

Hi keith,

As google says they honor next/prev signals there whould not be any problem with your pagination. Keep in mind that it could take some time to completely understand the new structure and start showing the correct results. For a 10k pages ecommercer, i'd say about  6-8 weeks.

Also, please make sure that those pagination tags are implemented correctly.
Here some resources:

Indicate paginated content - Search Console Help
SEO Guide to Google Webmaster Recommendations for Pagination - Moz Blog
Pagination & SEO: Best practices - YOAST

Hope it helps.
Best Luck.
GR.