As you know, Google told us they just realized that rel=next and rel=prev is no longer supported for the past year or so. Yea, I know. So now what? How do you ensure Google can find your paginated content? How do you communicate to Google a series of pages is part of a set? Mihai Aperghis asked Google’s John Mueller a series of hard questions this morning in the webmaster hangout addressing this.

The questions and answers begin at the 14:35 mark into the video. I’ll post the transcript and embed below. But to make it quick, since it is like 10 minutes of video time, I’ll post bullet points of take aways from the Q&A:

Just keep doing what you are doing with pagination.
If you haven’t had issues up until now, then whatever you were doing has been working.
Google hasn’t supported them in years
Google just realized they haven’t supported them in years.
Google immediately wanted to let the community know they found this out.
This way Google won’t tell people to do things that are “kind of unnecessary.” I believe John here is referring to it being unnecessary for communicating to Google about combing pages into a set.
Nothing you need to change.
It’s definitely not the case that you need to remove all pagination
Same, not the case that you need to and make one giant page.
But you need to make sure the pagination pages can kind of stand on their own.
Use third party tools to see if there are crawling issues to get to deep product pages.

Here is the video embed at the start time:

Here is the transcript:

More from Google on this:

Forum discussion at Twitter.