Handling Pagination on a Large Cannabis Catalog

rel=prev/next is retired, so stop planning around it

Google confirmed years ago that it no longer uses rel=prev/next markup for indexing. The tags are harmless if your platform still emits them, but they solve nothing. Each paginated page now stands on its own: Google crawls it, evaluates it, and follows whatever product links it finds there. That makes two things matter — whether the pages can be crawled, and how many of them a crawler must walk through to reach your last product.

Canonical page 2 to itself, not to page 1

The most common pagination mistake on dispensary menus is pointing every paginated URL's canonical at page 1. That tells Google pages 2 and up are duplicates, so it drops them, and every product linked only from those pages loses its main discovery path. Each paginated URL should carry a self-referencing canonical. Page 3 of the flower category is not a duplicate of page 1; it lists different products. Recheck a couple of page-2 URLs after every platform or theme update, because menu software loves to quietly regress this setting.

Use links a crawler can follow

Load-more buttons and infinite scroll usually fetch products with JavaScript and never change the URL. A shopper scrolls happily. Googlebot does not scroll — it follows href attributes. If your menu grows only through a button, everything past the first batch of products has no crawlable path. Keep infinite scroll for people if you want it, but pair it with real paginated URLs and plain anchor links between them, including a link back to the start.

Shrink the depth before tuning the crawl

A 900-product menu at 24 items per page is a 38-page walk. No canonical strategy fixes that. Splitting the catalog into real categories and subcategories — flower by brand, carts by hardware type, edibles by format — turns one long sequence into many short ones, and each category page becomes a ranking asset of its own. Sort defaults matter too. Best sellers first means your most valuable products sit on page 1 of their category, closest to the homepage.

A worked example

A client menu held about 1,100 products behind an infinite-scroll page with one URL. Products past the first batch simply did not exist to a crawler. We split the menu into 14 categories, added paginated URLs with self-canonicals and visible page links, and set best sellers as the default sort. The deepest product on the site went from unreachable to four link hops from the homepage, and the category pages started ranking on their own.

Frequently asked questions

Should paginated pages go in the XML sitemap?

No. The sitemap should carry products and category pages. Paginated URLs exist to be crawled through, not landed on from search, so leave them crawlable via links and keep the sitemap for pages you actually want ranking.

Is noindexing page 2 and beyond a good idea?

Generally no. Pages that stay noindexed long-term get crawled less over time, and the product links on them lose discovery value. Leave paginated pages indexable with self-referencing canonicals; save noindex for faceted-filter bloat.