Do we need rel="prev" and rel="next" if we have a rel="canonical" for the first page of a series

[hjsand]

Despite having a canonical on page 1 of a series of paginated pages for different topics, Google is indexing several, sometimes many pages in each topic. This is showing up as duplicate page title issues in Moz and Screaming Frog.

Ideally Google would only index the first page in the series. Do we need to use rel="prev" etc rather than a canonical on page 1? How can we make sure Google crawls but doesn't index the rest of the series?

[MahuSims]

So for the pages, would it look like:

Blog page 1 "rel next"

Blog page 2 "rel prev" & "rel next"

and so on?

[LoganRay]

Having the markup only prevents them from dinging you for dupes, not necessarily from indexing.

[hjsand]

Thanks, super helpful! The canonical is only on the first page of the series but clearly we still need rel prev/next. Although I've noticed, from other sites that are using rel prev/next correctly that Google sometimes ignore that too and index a random selection of paginated pages.

[donsilvernail]

Hello Hjsand,

My experience is yes you should be using rel="next" and rel="prev" for paginated pages.

Here is a guide that can help you understand why and how to implement these guidelines

https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/seo-guide-to-google-webmaster-recommendations-for-pagination

Thanks,

[LoganRay]

Hi,

Google says they'll index paginated series properly and that they can usually interpret what the structure you've set, but as you're seeing, this is not always the case. The preferred method for pagination markup is to use rel prev/next, not to canonicalize the pages to the first or root version URL. The only place a canonical tag should live in a paginated series is on page=1 that points to the root URL.