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The advice is no longer current. If you want to see what Google used to say about rel=next/prev, you can read that on this archived URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20190217083902/https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en As you say Google are no longer using rel=prev/next as an indexation signal. Don't take that to mean that, Google are now suddenly blind to paginated content. It probably just means that their base-crawler is now advanced enough, not to require in-code prompting I still don't think that de-indexing all your paginated content with canonical tags is a good idea. What if, for some reason, the paginated version of a parent URL is more useful to end-users? Should you disallow Google from ranking that content appropriately, by using canonical tags (remember: a page that uses a canonical tag cites itself as non-canonical, making it unlikely that it could be indexed) Google may not find the parent URL as useful as the paginated variant which they might otherwise rank, so using canonical tags in this way could potentially reduce your number of rankings or ranking URLs. The effect is likely to be very slight, but personally I would not recommend de-indexation of paginated content via canonical tags (unless you are using some really weird architecture that you don't believe Google would recognise as pagination). The parameter based syntax of "?p=" or "&p=" is widely adopted, Google should be smart enough to think around this If Search Console starts warning you of content duplication, maybe consider canonical deployment. Until such a time, it's not really worth it