Infinite scroll is a design pattern where new content loads automatically as a visitor scrolls down, so there is no click to a second page. It is usually built with JavaScript, which matters for search engines because they do not scroll.
How does infinite scroll affect SEO?
Google’s documentation says its crawlers do not click buttons and generally do not run JavaScript functions that need a user action to change the page. Content that appears only after scrolling may therefore never be seen. Google also crawls URLs it finds in the href attribute of <a> elements.
The recommended setup gives each chunk of content its own URL, for example ?page=2, and links these pages with normal <a href> links. Each page should have its own canonical URL. Scrolling can still load the next chunk for users while the paginated URLs stay available for crawlers.
Google also notes that infinite scroll can cause scrolling fatigue because the size of the result set is unclear.
Example
<!-- Crawlable fallback: real links to the next page -->
<nav>
<a href="/shoes?page=2">Next page</a>
</nav>
JavaScript can load /shoes?page=2 into the list as the visitor nears the end, while the link stays in the HTML for crawlers.
Common mistakes
- Next-page content exists only as a JavaScript fetch with no URL of its own.
- A Load more button without a link behind it.
- Fragment URLs (
#page2), which Google generally does not support for changing content. - No way to reach the footer. Nielsen Norman Group points out that endless loading can make the footer unreachable and that the scroll position is often lost after clicking back.
- The first page is used as the canonical URL of the whole sequence. Google advises giving each page its own canonical URL.
- Relying on
rel="next"andrel="prev". Google no longer uses these tags, although other search engines may still use them.
Sources
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