A product can be available to buy, visible after several taps on “Load more”, and still lack a dependable route for Google to discover it through your category pages. For an online retailer, that is worth checking before commissioning more product descriptions or changing the whole shop design.
You do not automatically need to remove infinite scroll. You need evidence that later products are reachable without a visitor having to trigger every extra batch. Start with one commercially important category and trace the route from the category to a product near the end.
Why working for shoppers is only half the test
In a normal shopping session, someone opens a category, scrolls, loads more items and chooses a product. A developer watching that session may reasonably conclude that the catalogue works.
Google does not reproduce all those interactions. Its current pagination guidance says crawlers do not click buttons and generally do not trigger JavaScript functions requiring user action. A working button therefore does not establish that Google can reach everything it reveals.
That does not prove an affected product is absent from Google. It may have been discovered elsewhere. Treat this as a navigation investigation, with separate checks for the individual product URLs.
Choose a useful sample before changing the website
Pick a category that matters to sales, preferably one with enough products to require several batches. Avoid testing only a short category that never reaches the loading control.
For a hypothetical lighting retailer, useful examples might be a pendant shown immediately, a wall light revealed after the first extra batch, and a table lamp near the end. These are test positions, not evidence of a fault or a predicted sales uplift.
Record:
- The category address and its default sorting order.
- A product URL from the initial view, a middle batch and the final batch.
- Whether you were signed in, using a filter or viewing a personalised selection.
- The device, test time and steps needed to reach each product.
Keep the investigation on the ordinary category route first. Search, filters and alternative sorting can introduce separate problems and make it harder to reproduce the original behaviour.
Check whether later batches have usable addresses
Open the category in a fresh browser session. Move beyond the initial products and watch the address bar. If the address changes, copy it into another tab and open it directly. Does it return the relevant later section, or start again at the beginning?
An unchanged address is a reason to ask how the underlying pagination works; it is not conclusive proof that no alternative route exists.
Google’s infinite-scroll recommendations call for persistent, unique URLs for the individual chunks, linked in sequence. They also recommend updating the displayed URL when a newly loaded chunk becomes the main visible section, so people can refresh, share and return to it.
Ask your developer to demonstrate a later address opening independently. Do not accept a demonstration that first visits the category and repeats all the scrolling: that tests the interactive route again.
For a changing catalogue, also check what happens after products are added, removed or reordered. You are looking for a dependable paging mechanism, not a promise that a particular item will occupy the same position forever.
Inspect the links behind the presentation
The developer should check both the links between batches and the product links within them. A control can look like an ordinary link while relying entirely on a script.
Google’s crawlable-link guidance recommends an HTML anchor with an href pointing to a resolvable web address. Links inserted through JavaScript can qualify when they use that markup; JavaScript itself is not the deciding factor.
Request evidence of the relevant links in the rendered HTML. For the sampled middle and final batches, ask the developer to identify the product addresses and show how a crawler reaches that batch from the earlier one.
Keep this request specific. “Please make the shop SEO friendly” is difficult to verify. “Show the link route from this category to these three products, including the later batch URLs” gives both sides a clear test.
Keep the shopping experience and repair the missing route
If shoppers find the current browsing pattern useful, ask whether it can remain as an enhancement over a working paginated route. The repair should address the demonstrated gap while preserving a usable shop.
For ordinary category pagination, Google recommends sequential links and a unique URL for each page. Each page should have its own canonical URL rather than all later pages declaring the first page as canonical. Page numbers should not exist only after a # fragment. These requirements are set out in its pagination requirements.
Also avoid treating old rel="next" and rel="prev" tags as the repair: Google’s current guidance says it no longer uses them.
Before approving development, agree which category template is affected, what will change and how the original sample will be retested. If several templates use different loading systems, do not assume that repairing one fixes them all.
Check the rest of the catalogue structure
A category should form part of a useful browsing route. Google’s ecommerce site-structure guidance recommends links through categories and subcategories to all product pages you want indexed. It also explains that Googlebot generally does not submit searches into a website’s search box.
Finding a product by typing its exact name into your shop search therefore answers a different question from reaching it through category navigation.
Use the sample to look for patterns. Are later products missing only from one category design? Are important products reachable solely through search? Does a seasonal range have a sensible place in the main browsing structure?
Choose the repair around what customers need to find. Adding an indiscriminate list of every product to the footer would be a poor substitute for clear categories and a working route through them.
Use the sitemap as another discovery route
Check that the sampled product URLs appear in the appropriate current sitemap where intended. Google’s sitemap documentation explains that sitemaps help discovery, particularly on larger or more complex websites, but do not guarantee crawling or indexing.
A product appearing in the sitemap is useful evidence of an additional route. It does not demonstrate that the category’s loading mechanism works, so keep both tests in the handover.
If Search Console cannot retrieve the file, use our guide to sitemap fetch errors to investigate that failure separately. Avoid replacing a navigation repair with repeated sitemap submissions.
Verify the repair in Search Console and in the shop
Check what Google can retrieve now
Use Search Console’s URL Inspection tool on a later batch address. Run a live test and inspect the tested page’s HTML for the expected product links. Then inspect the sampled product URLs separately.
Google distinguishes its stored indexing information from the live test. A successful live test does not guarantee indexing, and the live test cannot predict Google’s canonical selection. Use the indexed result for the recorded Google-selected canonical and crawl information.
Repeat the customer journey
On mobile and desktop, browse beyond the initial batch, open a product and use the back button. Check that shoppers can continue sensibly. Also test refresh, a directly opened later address, and the last batch where no further products remain.
Ask for a concise handover containing the original sample, before-and-after evidence, the repair date and any remaining exceptions. That gives you a baseline for checking the next theme or category-template update.
After Google has had an opportunity to revisit the pages, review the sampled products’ indexing information and relevant Search Console performance. Treat commercial improvement as something to measure, rather than an automatic consequence of fixing the links.
Decide what the evidence warrants
If later batches have usable addresses and crawlable links, investigate the individual product pages before replacing the loading design. If the route breaks after the first batch, commission a focused repair and repeat the same tests.
If you want help tracing that route, talk to BuzzBoost. Send the category address and a few products that appear only after loading more. We can discuss the navigation, rendering and indexing checks needed to define the work.
Featured image: AI-generated editorial artwork, not a photograph of a real BuzzBoost office, client or result.
