Infinite scroll bad for SEO?

[TomSnow]

My team wants to make our blog infinite scroll instead of paginated.

My understanding is that Google can't always emulate manual user actions like scrolling. So they recommend chunking the infinite scroll page into component pages in the source, and creating a URL structure that reflects that chunking.

One article I read mentioned using rel="next" in addition to the above, but Google plainly stated they don't use rel="next", so not sure if I can trust that opinion.

Google has a webmaster guide for infinite scroll but it hasn't been updated since 2014. Should I just follow their guidelines?

Anyone have experience with infinite scroll? An crawl/index roadblocks?

Thanks!

[lucy24]

Infinite scroll bad for human users?

ftfy.

[tangor]

Infinite scroll benefits---who?

Go from there.

[NickMNS]

My understanding is that Google can't always emulate manual user actions like scrolling. So they recommend chunking the infinite scroll page into component pages in the source, and creating a URL structure that reflects that chunking.

This is correct.
For more details I strongly suggest that you watch this video from Google I/O 2018
[youtube.com...]

One article I read mentioned using rel="next" in addition to the above, but Google plainly stated they don't use rel="next", so not sure if I can trust that opinion.

rel=next / previous support is dead, at least in terms of Google.

Google has a webmaster guide for infinite scroll but it hasn't been updated since 2014. Should I just follow their guidelines?

There are several, they should still be relevant. The ones I have read all had really good recommendations. Often when one lands on a bad infinite-scroll site (and that is not hard to do) [it actually is exceptional to land on an infinite scroll site that is properly implemented and usable] those bad sites haven't implemented many of the recommendations. Side note: My favorite design flaw is when content keeps being added to the page, scroll after scroll, but nothing is ever removed, this goes on until the browser eventually runs out of memory and crashes.

Getting an infinite-scroll site right is no easy task both from an SEO perspective and usability perspective. It requires a lot of care and work as well as a meticulous attention to detail. The question to ask is, is that work (short hand for money) real worth it, and what do you hope to gain by going to infinite scroll?