Rel=prev/next was an HTML markup convention previously used to indicate the relationship between paginated pages in a sequence, such as page 2 of a blog archive, helping search engines understand that a series of pages together made up one larger content sequence.
Google officially stopped using rel=prev/next as a signal in 2019, meaning it no longer carries the SEO significance it once did, though some websites may still have the markup present from earlier implementations.
Modern pagination best practices instead rely on clear internal linking between paginated pages and proper self-referencing canonical tags, rather than the now-deprecated rel=prev/next markup.
We follow current pagination best practices within our Technical SEO service.