Can cursor based pagination be used for SEO?

Question

We have a category page which may contain hundreds of thousands of posts. We want to paginate these results using cursor based pagination.

The base page may look like:

www.example.com/topic/category

This page will have two links at the bottom:

Previous -> null
Next -> www.example.com/topic/category?before=SOME_ENCRYPTED_ALPHANUMERIC_STRING_HERE

A few pages down the lane might have these links:

Previous -> www.example.com/topic/category?after=SOME_ENCRYPTED_ALPHANUMERIC_STRING_HERE
Next -> www.example.com/topic/category?before=SOME_ENCRYPTED_ALPHANUMERIC_STRING_HERE

However, in this strategy, it would lead to a large number of links as the content moves around due to more content being generated everyday. It will also lead to duplicate content, as multiple links may point to a bucket of content that was already covered in some other URL.

Does this mean cursor based pagination cannot be used effectively for SEO ?

If yes, does exposing your API with just a page parameter a good practice ? (as it will make it very easy for anyone to crawl the data)

What does "cursor based pagination" mean and where did you pick up the term? — davidgo, Jan 18 '21 at 19:25
https://jsonapi.org/profiles/ethanresnick/cursor-pagination/ — code, Jan 18 '21 at 19:28
Pagination of any type is bad for SEO and rarely used by visitors. — Stephen Ostermiller, Jan 19 '21 at 01:27

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 18 '21 at 19:28

This would seem to be a way to burn up your link budget and dilute your keywords for the page, so likely not a great idea.

I can't see how "exposing your API" can help with SEO - Google would not recognise how to use an API, nor would it help Google in finding your content.

Can cursor based pagination be used for SEO?

1 Answers1