Google serp pagination issue

[summithomes]

We are a local real estate company and have landing pages for different communities and cities around our area that display the most recent listings. For example: www.mysite.com/wa/tumwater is our landing page for the city of Tumwater homes for sale. Google has indexed most of our landing pages, but for whatever reason they are displaying either page 2, 3, 4 etc... instead of page 1.  Our Roy, WA landing page is another example. www.mysite.com/wa/roy has recently been showing up on page 1 of Google for "Roy WA homes for sale", but now we are much further down and www.mysite.com/wa/roy?start=80 (page 5) is the only page in the serps. (coincidentally we no longer have 5 pages worth of listings for this city, so this link now redirects to www.mysite.com/wa/roy.) We haven't made any major recent changes to the site. Any help would be much appreciated!

*You can see what my site is in the attached image... I just don't want this post to show up when someone google's the actual name of the business

nTTrSMx.jpg C4mhfgh.jpg

[LoganRay]

I took a look at the paginated versions of these pages and it looks like canonicals and rel next/prev are all setup correctly. Have you gone into Search Console and specified the purpose of the 'start' parameter? That might help Google better interpret what's going on. Typically pagination is handled by a more accurately named parameter which could be causing confusion, despite having canonical/prev/next tags configured properly. Under the Crawl menu in Search Console, go to URL Parameters and configure 'start' for pagination.

[summithomes]

Thank you very much... I will take a look at that

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Summithomes

Just to be clear on Logan's advice:

Go to search console and select Crawl from the left-hand menu.

Then URL Parameters > Configure URL parameters

Look for the parameter that controls pagination, usually 'page'

Click Edit on the right-hand side:

In the drop-down menu click 'Select' and select 'Yes, changes, renders or narrows page content'

From the second menu: Paginates Then select: Every URL (see attachment)

Then you are done. Google will understand that this parameter controls pagination.

The full process is here: https://moz.com/blog/seo-guide-to-google-webmaster-recommendations-for-pagination

Regards

Nigel

cizwrt6

[summithomes]

Thank you! I'll be putting this in place shortly. Also just to follow up it appears google has resolved this pagination issue, at least from what I can tell. The only change we made right when this happened was switching to a different phone number on all the property detail pages... But I can't imagine that would have made much difference.

[Nigel_Carr]

That would not have made any difference and Google doesn't work that quickly. How old are the screenshots?

[summithomes]

I took the screenshots a few minutes before I posted...

[Nigel_Carr]

That's weird?

Unless they were already in the process of deindexing.

Best practice is to set the parameter

Regards