Pagination and SEO
Why Webmasters Stack Exchange recommends it
Webmasters Stack Exchange users link it when answering questions about pagination, rel=prev/next and canonical tags, since it comes straight from a Google search engineer.
Recommended by 2 people across 2 different months, 2012 to 2016.
What it is
A 2012 Google Search Central talk by Maile Ohye on how to handle paginated content such as multi-page articles and product category listings. She covers the SEO options available, including a View All page, rel="next" and rel="prev" markup, and how rel=canonical interacts with them.
What people said
Recommends Anthony Hatzopoulos · 2012-08 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Getting link to abstract indexed in Google Scholar”
Also Google's Maile Ohye touches on some of the negatives of the canonical tag in this rel prev/next video (not quite the same but you'll get the idea of when not to use rel canonical and how it works) [this video]
Recommends Goyllo · 2016-12 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Google is indexing different pages of the same list”
Yeah I am also watching [this video] about that, and displaying many webpages content in single webpage is probably not good idea for UX(If it take many seconds to load). If there are 10 webpages then it make sense, but for hundred it is not. Now I get it that View All means, all of the paginated content should be place in one simple webpage and that webpage link should be used as canonical by other webpages. So webmaster did not face duplicate content issue.
Cites merk · 2013-03 · Webmasters Stack Exchange · on “Should rel=canonical point to page one of a set and still have rel=prev/next on the page as well?”
I've got a page which displays search results and I've added rel=prev and rel=next meta tags to the page to cover the paging. However, someone is saying I should also add a rel=canonical tag to the page that points to the start page of the search results. So for example, say we're on mysite.com/search/xyz/page5 the canonical tag would point to mysite.com/search/xyz/ Is this wise? isn't the purpose of the prev and next tags to tell the SE that all these pages are of a set? But then putting the canonical tag in there is sort of telling the SE that the first page is unique and not part of this set? [this video] According to that video from google, it sounds like we should not use the canonical link.