User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/We're updating the look of categories to improve your community's SEO/@comment-31197006-20181130212320

Horrible pagination implementation. Putting 28 links at the TOP of the page and forcing us to scroll past it before we have a chance to see an article that might be interesting, I don't even understand how you did that. Also we don't need more pagination options then there are articles in a category, why show it if everything is already on one page?

If the original categories were hurting SEO you're not using the canonical, next and prev meta tags properly. Fixing it only on the new implementation and leaving it broken on the old is a dishonest practice to skew the data in favor of the new implementation. You're also sacrificing the future of categories because no one is going to want to maintain pages that are low-quality from a user experience standpoint.