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Dani 5,664 The Queen of DaniWeb

How do you handle your link discoverability when also using infinite scroll.

As we know, Google has been ignoring link rel=prev/next for years.

A lot of my older content is showing up with no internal links.

I do have HTML page navigation but it’s hidden with display:none

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Dani AI

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— infinite scroll can be made search-friendly, but it needs addressable, crawlable entry points rather than client-only states. The practical approach is progressive enhancement: provide real paginated pages that return the same content when visited directly, then enhance UX with infinite loading and the History API so users and search engines see stable URLs.

Recommended checklist:

  • Create indexable paginated URLs (for example, /archive/page/3) and ensure each URL renders full content server-side or via pre-render so a crawler does not need to execute JS to see the items.

  • Keep a stable canonical for each paginated page (self-referential canonical tags) so each page is its own source of truth.

  • When new items load via JS, update the address bar with the History API so each state has a bookmarkable URL:

    history.pushState(null, '', '/archive/page/3');

  • Put those paginated URLs into the XML sitemap and into unambiguous internal navigation links so crawlers can find them without relying on dynamic loading alone.

  • Use accessible fallbacks (a visible "view pages" or "older posts" list) so both users and bots can jump to older content.

Troubleshooting and testing: use Google Search Console URL Inspection to fetch-and-render representative paginated URLs, then crawl the site with a tool such as Screaming Frog to confirm anchors, HTTP status, and canonical tags. For implementation guidance see Google's notes on infinite scroll and the History API documentation: and History.pushState.

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