Claude AI

Pagination Audit Claude Skill

By Jake Labate, SEO Professional Published | Updated Read Time 2 mins

This skill audits a website's paginated series — blog listings, category pages, and search results — and produces an actionable report focused on keeping deep, paginated content indexable. It crawls pages and inspects canonical tags, meta robots, rel=next/prev, and page-number URL patterns to find paginated pages that canonicalize to page 1 (hiding deep content from the index), noindexed component pages, paginated pages missing a self-canonical, broken or inconsistent rel=next/prev, and redundant ?page=1 first pages.

Quick Take

Point the skill at a site root or URL list that includes listing pages with their ?page= or /page/N/ URLs. It maps each paginated series and returns a prioritized report of what's keeping page 2 and beyond out of the index.

What The Skill Checks

  • Indexation traps: paginated pages that canonicalize to page 1 (hiding deep content) and noindexed component pages.
  • Canonical and series signals: paginated pages missing a self-canonical and broken or inconsistent rel=next/prev.
  • URL hygiene: redundant ?page=1 first pages that duplicate the series root.

How The Skill Is Packaged

The skill follows the standard Claude Agent Skill structure: a SKILL.md file with YAML frontmatter and workflow instructions, a references/ folder with the full audit check definitions and report template, and a scripts/ folder with Python scripts that crawl the site and extract pagination signals (canonicals, meta robots, rel=next/prev, and page-number URL patterns), then audit the resulting series. Install it with npx claude-seo-skills install pagination-audit, or copy the skill folder into your Claude skills directory; Claude invokes it automatically when a request matches its description.

Skill Files

Every file in the skill is embedded below directly from the Claude-SEO-Skills repository, so you can review exactly what the skill instructs Claude to do before installing it.

SKILL.md

The skill definition: frontmatter, inputs to collect, the workflow, and the resources the skill relies on.

Audit Checks Reference (references/audit-checks.md)

Full definitions, severities, and rationale for every check across the high, medium, and low tiers.

Report Template (references/report-template.md)

The output structure the skill follows, including the sections issues are grouped into.

Pagination Extractor Script (scripts/extract_pagination.py)

Crawls pages and inventories pagination signals: canonical tags, meta robots, rel=next/prev, and page-number URL patterns.

Pagination Auditor Script (scripts/audit_pagination.py)

Audits each paginated series against the checks and outputs the structured report data.