Inherited a site where every paginated category page (page 2, 3, 4…) has a canonical pointing to page 1. The categories have 10-25 pages each, around 800 products total.
Products that only appear on page 3 or later seem to get crawled way less often, and a few of them aren’t indexed at all.
I’m fairly sure self-referencing canonicals are the right fix, but the previous agency argued this was intentional to avoid duplicate content. Anyone made this switch and seen what happened?