As of September 8, 2019 WPengine has switched to keeping this function turned off by default but left the option to turn it on. This is a great move and gives website owners and SEOs the control they need over bots and crawl budget.

Everyone who’s followed my comments on hosting over the years will know that I’m a pretty big fan of WPengine. Or maybe it’s “was” as there is a major issue with their setup that not only may impact SEO but if you have any type of sizeable site – WILL impact it.

The Problem With Pagination …

The problem is with the pagination.

For those not familiar with the term –> your blog, categories, etc. likely have a lot of posts across a lot of pages. When you scroll to the bottom of the page you’ll likely see something like:

Click any of those links and you’ll get to /page/2/, /page/3/, etc. all the way up to /page/81/ (in this case).

Well it turns out that at WPengine this works by default all the way up to /page/9/ for both users and search engine bots. As soon as you enter double-digits the bots are redirected to the homepage.

You can see it in action in the GIF below on the Beanstalk site:

This is obviously a major issue. Not only does it impact content discovery but it will impact the PageRank flow through your blog and specifically to older posts. Some may not even be discoverable by bots.

What Can You Do?

I immediately got onto support chat and the cause of the issue was described as:

“That is happening because of a setting on our platform called redirect bots. It can be turned off but by default it is enabled.”

So … if you’re hosted with WPengine, get on the phone or chat system and get them to disable “redirect bots”.