Every WordPress blog with more than ten posts has them. /category/seo/page/2/, /page/3/, on down to wherever the archive runs out. Sooner or later someone asks whether they should be in Google, finds a plugin setting called Noindex Subpages, and switches it on.
I want to argue against that, and then show you something more useful than the argument: how to read your own paginated archives out of the Page indexing report, so you can tell what your site is actually doing rather than what you think you configured.
Should page 2 of a WordPress category be indexed?
Left alone, yes, and both major plugins already agree with that.
The thing worth understanding is that indexing page 2 was never the point. Crawling it is. Your archive pages are how Google walks from your homepage to post number forty-seven. Noindex the archive subpages and you eventually cut that path.
That last bit rests on a John Mueller comment from a 2017 Webmaster Hangout, and I want to flag it properly because it gets quoted everywhere as though it were documentation: “If we see the noindex there for longer then we think this page REALLY doesn’t want to be used in search so we will remove it completely. And then we won’t follow the links anyway. So noindex and follow is essentially the same as a noindex, nofollow.” That is a transcript on Search Engine Roundtable. There is no Search Central page that states it, so treat it as reported rather than official.
Yoast, who acted on it, put the consequence in their own words: adding noindex to page 2 and beyond of paginated archives is “a bad idea, as it might lead to your articles no longer getting the internal links they need.”
Does Yoast or Rank Math noindex paginated pages by default?
Neither does, and I checked the shipped code rather than the documentation, because neither plugin’s help pages actually state their defaults.
Yoast SEO 28.5 has no such setting at all. Grepping the plugin for any noindex-subpages option returns nothing, which matches Yoast’s own account of removing it in version 6.3. In indexable-term-archive-presentation.php, generate_canonical() returns the paginated URL itself once the page number is above 1, so page 2 canonicalises to page 2.
Rank Math 1.0.278 ships two separate toggles and both default to off. In includes/settings/titles/misc.php, noindex_archive_subpages and noindex_paginated_pages are each 'default' => 'off', and the installer writes the same value on a fresh install. Its get_canonical_paged() appends the paged query variable, so Rank Math self-canonicalises page 2 too.
Those two toggles are also the most confused pair of settings in the plugin, so to be clear about what each one does:
- Noindex Subpages covers paginated archives, meaning
/category/seo/page/2/ - Noindex Paginated Single Pages covers single posts split with the
<!--nextpage-->quicktag, and per the field’s own description, the Blog page as well
Both sit behind Advanced Mode, which is a reasonable hint about how often you should be touching them.
So if your /page/2/ URLs are noindexed, nothing did that by default. Somebody turned it on, or a migration did. Rank Math’s Yoast importer maps the old noindex-subpages-wpseo key straight onto noindex_archive_subpages, which means a Yoast-to-Rank-Math migration can quietly restore a setting Yoast deliberately deleted eight years ago. That is a specific, checkable cause, and it is the first thing I look for when a WordPress site’s archives have gone missing after a plugin change.
I did not verify AIOSEO’s or SEOPress’s defaults in code, only that both expose an equivalent toggle in their documentation, so check yours rather than assuming it matches.
Does Google still use rel=next and rel=prev?
No, and this is where most of the advice you will find is simply out of date.
Google’s current pagination documentation says it plainly: “In the past, Google used <link rel="next" href="..."> and <link rel="prev" href="..."> to identify next page and previous page relationships. Google no longer uses these tags, although these links may still be used by other search engines.”
Rank Math’s own knowledge base page on this topic still opens by telling you it “adds rel="next" and rel="prev" tags for your paginated series as per Google’s guidelines”. That has not been true since 2019. The tags are harmless, both plugins still emit them, and Bing does still read them, so there is no cleanup job here. But do not let a page that is wrong about 2019 talk you into a noindex decision in 2026.
Should /page/2/ canonical to page 1?
No. Google’s documentation is unusually direct about it: “Don’t use the first page of a paginated sequence as the canonical page. Instead, give each page its own canonical URL.”
Two more things from that same page that surprise people:
- Pages in a paginated sequence do not need unique titles. Google says “you can use the same titles and descriptions for all pages in the sequence”, which is the opposite of the general advice and saves you fighting your theme over it.
- Linking from every page in the sequence back to page 1 is worth doing, because it “can give Google a hint that the first page of a collection might be a better landing page than other pages in the collection”.
Nowhere on that page does Google recommend noindexing paginated URLs. The absence is worth noticing given how much advice assumes otherwise.
Reading your pagination out of the Page indexing report
Here is the part I actually use, and the reason I stopped diagnosing this from the settings screen. Every configuration choice produces a different, identifiable status, so the report tells you what your site is doing regardless of what the plugin panel claims.
| What your setup does to /page/2/ | Where it lands | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| A plugin noindex toggle is on | Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag | Eventually your internal links |
| Something canonicalises page 2 to page 1 | Alternate page with proper canonical tag | The same, more quietly |
| No canonical emitted, Google picks page 1 itself | Duplicate without user-selected canonical | Usually nothing, but it hides a theme bug |
| Self-canonical, indexable, Google passes | Crawled, currently not indexed | Nothing at all |
That last row is the one to internalise. Crawled but not indexed on /page/2/ is the healthy resting state for a correctly configured WordPress archive. Google’s own definition ends with “no need to resubmit this URL for crawling”, and on a small blog most of your deep pagination will sit there permanently. It is not a bug, and chasing it is how people end up switching on the noindex toggle that causes a real problem.
The two rows that cost you something are the first two. Both mean a URL that used to pass link equity down to your posts has stopped.
What I check first
Not the settings screen. Plugin panels lie by omission: they show you the toggle’s position without telling you what the theme, a functions.php snippet, or a leftover import did afterwards.
So I inspect a live /page/2/ URL and read three fields: Indexing allowed?, the User-declared canonical, and the Google-selected canonical. If the declared canonical says /page/2/ and Google’s says /category/seo/, I have my answer in one screen, and I know the plugin is fine and Google simply disagrees. Then I filter the Page indexing report by the /page/ path to see the whole series at once instead of one URL at a time.
When there are enough of them to make that tedious, I paste the list into the bulk URL inspection tool I built on this site and read the statuses in one pass. Pagination is the case that made it worth building, because the useful signal is the pattern across forty URLs rather than the verdict on any one of them.
Two things I would not do. I would not block /page/ in robots.txt, because that stops Google seeing the archive and following the links in it, which is a heavier version of the same mistake, and noindex and robots.txt are not interchangeable anyway. And I would not confuse this with faceted navigation, which produces archive-shaped index bloat that looks identical in the report and needs the opposite treatment: facets multiply URLs without adding content, pagination does not.
If page 1 of the archive is what you are really unsure about, that is the prior decision and a different question. Whether category and tag pages belong in Google at all comes first. Page 2 only matters once you have decided to keep page 1.
Sources
- Google Search Central, Pagination, incremental page loading, and their impact on Google Search, for the instruction not to canonicalise to page 1, the confirmation that Google no longer uses rel=next and rel=prev, the note that paginated pages do not need unique titles, and the advice to link back to page 1, checked 5 September 2026
- Google Search Console Help, Page indexing report, for the definitions of Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag, Alternate page with proper canonical tag, Duplicate without user-selected canonical, and Crawled - currently not indexed, checked 5 September 2026
- Google Search Central Blog, URL Parameters tool deprecated, 28 March 2022, for the deprecation date and the statement that only about 1% of parameter configurations were useful for crawling, checked 5 September 2026
- Yoast, Pagination and SEO best practices, for the removal of the noindex-subpages option in Yoast SEO 6.3 and the internal-links argument against noindexing page 2, checked 5 September 2026
- Rank Math, How to noindex paginated pages and Titles and Meta, for the two toggles and the outdated rel=next/prev claim, checked 5 September 2026
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google: long-term noindex will lead to nofollow on the page, transcribing a 2017 Webmaster Hangout, checked 5 September 2026. Reported speech, not Google documentation
- First-hand: plugin defaults verified by reading the shipped source of Yoast SEO 28.5 and Rank Math 1.0.278 downloaded from wordpress.org on 5 September 2026, since neither vendor’s documentation states them