From: Search Engine Journal

Pagination is defined as the process of separating print or digital content into discrete pages. Websites that provide users with extensive long-form content benefit from this in that the pages are broken up to improve user experience. Blogs, educational articles, newsletters and discussion forums are all examples of commonly paginated website content.

When building paginated content, it used to be best practice to add directives within the code to tell search engines (e.g., Google) that this content continues onto the next page. Content strategists and SEOs alike always added the “rel=prev” or “rel=next” directive to the code to identify pagination.

Now, Google has informed the community that these directives are no longer necessary. In March 2019, Google Webmasters and Trends Analysts announced that the search engine has become smart enough to index webpages in a series the same way it would any other piece of content. As long as the proper linking strategy has been implemented, Google will read the content and index it appropriately.

As best practice, pagination identifiers (rel=next/prev) should still be added to multipage content. This is a new update, and it is hard to ensure that Google’s spiders will completely crawl the content. It is important to note that Bing still requires these directives to crawl paginated pages. While Google holds the highest overall index, no two search engines are the same and a holistic search strategy must abide by each accordingly.