What it is
Some sites split a long list of content across multiple numbered pages — page 1, page 2, page 3 of a blog archive, a product category, or search results. Pagination tags are a way of telling search engines "this page is part of a series; the next one is here, the previous one is there," so the relationship between them is explicit instead of guessed at.
Why it matters
For a site with genuinely paginated content, these tags help search engines understand that pages 2, 3, and 4 aren't random unrelated pages, but parts of one continuous series — which can help the right page in that series surface for a relevant search. For the large majority of sites that don't have any multi-page listings at all, this simply doesn't apply, and that's completely normal — it's not a gap to fix, just a signal that isn't relevant to your particular site.
How to fix it
- First check whether this applies to you at all: if no content on your site is split across numbered pages (page 1, page 2, etc.), there's nothing to do here.
- If you do have paginated content, add
<link rel="next" href="...">to every page that has a following page, and<link rel="prev" href="...">to every page that has a preceding one, inside the<head>section. - Make sure each href points to a real, working URL for the adjacent page — a pagination tag with a broken or placeholder link is worse than not having one.
- If you're using a CMS or e-commerce platform, check whether it generates these automatically for category/archive pages before adding them by hand.
- Re-run your Launch Readiness check to confirm any pagination tags found have valid destination links.