Handling many similar pages.
WHERE THIS ARISES
Blog archives spanning many pages Shop categories with many products Filtered and sorted views
THE PROBLEM
Endless variations of similar pages consume crawling and add no value.
FOR PAGINATION
Page two and beyond should be crawlable so products and posts are found.
Their individual value is low, which is fine.
FOR FILTERS AND SORTING
Every combination creates an address.
A shop with several filters can generate thousands of pointless pages.
WHAT TO DO
Canonical tags pointing at the unfiltered version Or block filter parameters in robots.txt Or mark them not to be indexed
WHICH APPROACH
Depends on your platform. An SEO plugin usually offers settings.
WHY IT MATTERS
Crawling budget spent on filter combinations is not spent on your real pages.
For a large site that matters.
FOR A SMALL SITE
Less critical, and still worth setting correctly.
WHAT TO CHECK
How many pages Search Console reports as crawled but not indexed.
A very large number suggests this problem.
