Pagination and Canonicals in Webflow

Publishing help SEO
1

We need to clean up our URL-Structure to reduce the amount of pages in the Google index.

Our problem is that paginated pages are getting into the google index and thus bloating up the index with useless content. We need a way to either say that a paginated page has a canonical or get rid of pagination.

Are there any ways of solving our problem?

Here is my site Read-Only: [LINK]1

2

Hi there!

Search engines like Google naturally index paginated pages as they are part of your site’s structure. While this is usually beneficial for content discovery, you may want to control which pages appear in search results. The Sitemap indexing toggle in Webflow gives you precise control over which pages search engines can index.

To manage page indexing:

  1. Navigate to your site’s Pages panel
  2. Select the page you want to modify
  3. Click the gear icon to open page settings
  4. Find the “Sitemap indexing” toggle
  5. Switch it off to prevent the page from being indexed

This feature is particularly useful for pagination pages that might contain duplicate or thin content, helping you maintain a cleaner search presence while keeping your site structure intact.

Hopefully this helps! If you still need assistance, please reply here so somebody from the community can help.

3

It looks like you’re already using Webflow’s automatic canonicals.
As of a year ago, that includes paginated querystrings which is odd to me, but technically fine, and might eliminate some SEO-tool complaints ( AHREFs, screaming frog… )

Webflow does not have a way to switch this off, either at the collection list level or the page level, though a page-level option would be nice. I’d personally prefer that the canonical ignores the pagination querystring.

That said, Google only uses the canonical as a recommendation anyway, and the fact that these paginated-querystring URLs are not in the sitemap makes it a “weak signal.” It’s a hint, not a directive, Google will still do what it wants to with your content.

In general, you want more pages in SERPs, not less, and I’d design your pages so that even the paginated ones have good value.

But if it’s really creating problems, a few options…

  1. Disable automated canonicals, and add them manually in the HEAD code of each page where you want them.
  2. Use a small piece of script to modify the canonical and remove the querystring. I’d made this inline, in the HEAD, just after the canonical is rendered. Googlebot will run simple scripts before indexing. Only affects Google, most search engines do not execute JS before indexing.
  3. Build a reverse proxy to strip those querystrings.

Remember though that those canonicals are just a suggestion to Google. If you really want these pages de-indexed the more important thing is to meta noindex those paginated-querystring pages.

You can build a detect-and-noindex pretty easily using approaches 2 or 3 above.

Here’s an example you can paste in your site-wide HEAD, that will create the meta noindex only when the *_page querystrings are detected. Obviously, test and use with caution.

<!-- Noindex paginated versions of this page only --> 
<script>
  (function () {
    const params = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search);
    for (const key of params.keys()) {
      if (key.endsWith('_page')) {
        const meta = document.createElement('meta');
        meta.name = 'robots';
        meta.content = 'noindex';
        document.head.appendChild(meta);
        break;
      }
    }
  })();
</script>