Paging Question: Rel Next or Canonical?

[Bondara]

Hi,

Lets say you have a category which displays a list of 20 products and pagination of up to 10 pages.

The root page has some content but when you click through the paging the content is removed leaving only the list of products.

Would it be best to apply a canonical tag on the paging back to the root or apply the prev/next tags.

I understand prev/next is good for say a 3 part article where each page holds unique content but how do you handle the above situation?

Thanks

[Aleyda]

Hi there,

As Eric mentioned before, the solution will depend on how much unique content is there in the paginated pages (from the main category page): If there is very very little unique content, crawling and indexing them won't really help on earning more search visibility with them (usually in these cases would be additional long-tail type of keywords for that product category) but just to consume the crawlers time and effort. Being this the case then the best way would be to canonicalize the paginated pages towards each one of their appropriate main product category page.

On the other hand, if the possibility exist to differentiate them: By featuring additional pages descriptions for each one of the paginated category pages or users reviews or ratings, or product descriptions of enough length, that can serve to give additional relevance value, then the best way to go would be to implement the rel next & prev annotations.

[Bondara]

Thanks,

The root page is not the 'view all' page but I do have a dropdown which allows for all the products to be viewed.

I wouldn't want this page being the page displayed in the SE's though because so many products are being loaded it can cause a lag.

using the SEOMOZ Toolbar I can see some of the paging along with filters (view all/cheapest/highest/a-z) have some juice, and ideally I only want the root page to show in SE's, so im thinking of canonical tagging all the paging and filters back to the root category page.

Thoughts?

[TopFloor]

I think the best course of action depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to avoid search engines from indexing the paginated pages (since they do not contain the unique content) then a rel canonical should do the trick. If you are trying to associate all the content that is provided on all pages as one, like in your example of the 3 part article, then the rel next/prev is your best bet.

Does your site have a "view all" option?