Are your paginated pages set up correctly?
Paginated pages are easy to get wrong. Canonicalising page 2 to page 1 tells Google that page 2 does not exist, so the products or posts on it are never discovered through the sequence.
Reads the canonical and rel next/prev signals on a sample of your pages. Nothing is stored.
How this check works
Shipwork reads a sample of your pages, identifies the paginated ones, and checks two signals: whether each paginated page canonicalises to itself (correct) or to a non-paginated URL (wrong), and whether it carries rel next/prev so crawlers can walk the sequence.
Questions
- Should page 2 canonicalise to page 1?
- No. Each paginated page should canonicalise to itself. Pointing page 2 at page 1 tells Google page 2 does not exist, so its items are not discovered through it.
- Do I need rel next/prev?
- It is a hint Google no longer uses for indexing, but other crawlers still read it and it makes the sequence explicit. It does no harm.
- Should paginated pages be in the sitemap?
- Generally no — list the first page and let links lead the crawler through the rest. Listing every page of a long series wastes crawl budget.