Google Pagination Changes

[moon-boots]

What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s).

Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first.

The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1.

I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it?

Is there anything I'm missing?

[effectdigital]

It's likely that they will be valued a bit less but the effects shouldn't be drastic. Even if you just had one massive page with all products on the ones at the top would likely get more juice anyway

If it's a crazy big concern, think about a custom method to sort your products

[moon-boots]

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond so eloquently.

If all the products would be visible in the base, non-modified source code (right click page, then click "view source" - is the data there?) then there is a high likelihood that Google will see and crawl it.

I can confirm that each product does in fact appear in the source data, so as you say, Google will crawl it which is somewhat of a relief.

Does this then mean that regardless of which page the products appear on, Google will simply ignore this factor and treat each product the same regardless?

The thing I am trying to avoid is products on page 2, 3 and so on from being valued less.

[effectdigital]

This is a great, technical SEO query!

What you have to understand is that whilst Google 'can' crawl JS, they often don't. They don't do it for just anyone, and even then they don't do it all of the time. Google's main mission is to 'index the web' - on that account their index of the web's pages, whilst vast - is still far from complete

Crawling JavaScript necessitates the usage of a headless browser (if you were using Python to script such a thing, you'd be using the Selenium or Windmill modules). A browser must open (even if it does so invisibly) and 'run' the JavaScript, which creates more HTML - which can then be crawled only **AFTER **the script execution

On average this takes 10x longer than basic, non-modified source code scraping. Ask your self, would Google take a 10x efficiency hit on an incomplete mission - for 'everyone' on the web? The answer is no (I see evidence of this every day across many client accounts)

Let's answer your question. If all the products would be visible in the base, non-modified source code (right click page, then click "view source" - is the data there?) then there is a high likelihood that Google will see and crawl it

If the data (code) only exists with right click, inspect element - and not in "view source" - then the data only exists in the 'modified' source code (not the base-source). In that scenario, Google would be extremely unlikely to crawl it (or always crawl it). If it's a very important page on a very important site (Coca Cola, M&S, Barclays, Santander) then Google may go further

For most of us, the best possible solution is to 'get' the data we want crawled, into the non-modified source code. This can be achieved by using JS only for the visual changes (but not the structure) or by adopting SSR (Server Side Rendering)

Hope that helps