Category URL Pagination where URLs don't change between pages

[whiteonlySEO]

Hello,

I am working on an e-commerce site where there are categories with multiple pages. In order to avoid pagination issues I was thinking of using rel=next and rel=prev and cannonical tags. I noticed a site where the URL doesn't change between pages, so whether you're on page 1,2, or 3 of the same category, the URL doesn't change. Would this be a cleaner way of dealing with pagination?

[whiteonlySEO]

Thank you, Oleg, for your response, and thanks, Matt, for jumping in.

The response was definitely very informative, but I'm still on the fence about this issue because, while Oleg confirmed what I had thought, that #2 would be the better choice, I now want to ensure that all the products on pages past page 1 will be crawlable by search engines. Any scenarios that you can think of in which search engines would not be able to read subsequent pages? Assuming that this is done using Ajax should we be okay?

(Please bear with me, my specialty is link building and content, not the technical stuff

[OlegKorneitchouk]

To add some info... if you want infinite scrolling + paginated pages, check out Google's demo.

[MattRoney]

Hi Michelle!

Did Oleg settle this for you?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

use #2 if search engines can see the content that would be on the other pages. if they can't see it, then use rel=next/prev

[whiteonlySEO]

Thank you! Just to clarify, this is a site that is being built from scratch so my question really is, what would be the best way to go about this?

1. use rel=next/prev and cannonical tags if necessary

2. ensuring that the URL doesn't change between pages 1,2, and 3 within the category

[OlegKorneitchouk]

If the paginated pages still exist (and can be indexed) but you want to load more products dynamically, without changing the URL, using rel=next/prev would work fine.