Should "View All Products" be the canonical page?

[pbhatt]

We currently have "view 12" as the default setting when someone arrives to www.mysite.com/subcategory-page.aspx. We have been advised to change the default to "view all products" and make that the canonical page to ensure all of our products get indexed. My concern is that doing this will increase the page load time and possibly hurt rankings. Does it make sense to change all our our subcategory pages to show all the products when someone visits the page? Most sites seem to have a smaller number of products as the default.

[john4math]

Google just announced some tags to help support pagination better.  They say if you have a view all option that doesn't take too long to load, searchers generally prefer that, so you can rel=canonical to that page.  However, if you don't have a view all page, then you can put these nifty rel="next" and rel="prev" tags in to let Google know your page has pagination, and where the next and previous pages are.

It sounds like you don't want to go the view all route, so you should read the second post below and you can implement the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags.

(from the view all post below) However, if you strongly desire your view-all page not to appear in search results: 1) make sure the component pages in the series don’t include rel=”canonical” to the view-all page, and 2) mark the view-all page as “noindex” using any of the standard methods.

View all: http://googlewebmastercentral.blo...

next/prev: http://googlewebmastercentral.blo...

[john4math]

I wouldn't show all products as a default page for users, as that doesn't sound like a good user experience.

Here are a few other Q&A entries from people with similar questions.  They endorse some different solutions to the problem:

• http://www.seomoz.org/q/paging-is-it-better-to-use-noindex-follow
• http://www.seomoz.org/q/canonical-pagination-content

[pbhatt]

Thanks Anthony and John.

Currently, www.mysite.com/subcategory-page.aspx shows 12 products. When I select "view 24" it adds the following to the end of the URL: "?P=1&S=G&Sh=24&Sr=1"

We have added the rel="canonical" tag to the all of the pages to direct all of the link juice to the default page and to avoid duplicate content issues and have added the parameters to Google WMT. Wouldn't changing our default page to show all the products for indexing purposes be faster than trying to developing links to all of the "hidden" product pages?

[john4math]

It sounds like the changes are in the URL parameters and their values.  Now in Google Webmaster Tools, if you go to the Site configuration > URL parameters page, you can tell Google how different parameters affect the page.

[AnthonyMangia]

In my experience, use of rel="canonical" is more related to consolidating external link juice.  If you're concerned with getting all of your products indexed, focus on creating a good XML sitemap and verifying it in Google Webmaster Tools, and finding ways to create both internal and external links to your deep URLs.  I would make the canonical page the one that you want to send visitors to.