In practice
Give every page in the sequence a self-referencing canonical and real, crawlable links to the next and previous pages.
Never canonicalise page two onto page one — it tells the engine the products or articles listed on page two do not exist.
Why it matters
Pagination decides whether the tail of a catalogue is discoverable at all.
Handled badly, it either buries inventory or floods the index with near-identical list pages.
Related terms