Canonicals on paginated pages: Crawl Audit check 68

Short answer: on a paginated series, each page should name itself as the canonical version. A common mistake is to point every page's canonical at page 1, which tells Google that pages 2 onwards are copies, so the products or posts listed only on those pages are harder to find. Check 68 warns when a paginated page doesn't point its canonical at itself.

What Crawl Audit checks

• It uses the same test as check 67 to decide whether the page is paginated.
• Pass: not paginated, so nothing to check.
• Pass: paginated, and the canonical's path matches the page's own path.
• Warning: paginated, and the canonical points to a different path, or is missing.

One limit to know: the check compares paths only. If your pages are /blog?page=2 and the canonical is /blog, the path is the same, so it passes even though that canonical points at page 1. If your pagination uses ?page=, open page 2 and read its canonical yourself.

What Google says

Google's pagination guide: "Don't use the first page of a paginated sequence as the canonical page. Instead, give each page its own canonical URL."

How to get it right

<!-- on https://example.com/blog?page=2 -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/blog?page=2">

• Keep the page number in the canonical. Do drop tracking parameters such as utm_source (check 69).
• Don't put the page number after a #, as in /blog#page2. Google's guide says "Google ignores fragment identifiers", so it may not follow those links.

On your platform

• WordPress, Shopify, Wix and Squarespace: the platform or SEO plugin writes these canonicals. Open page 2 of your blog or a large collection, view the source and search for canonical.
• Next.js: build the canonical from the full path including the page number, in generateMetadata under alternates.canonical.

Sources

• Google Search Central, Pagination, incremental page loading, and their impact on Google Search (updated 10 December 2025), checked 3 October 2026.