Can you use the canonical tag and rel=next and rel=prev on category pages.

[Palmbourne]

We have a conflict of information between our web developers and our SEO company. We are an on-line retail company hence we have a fair number of different categories. Our site is set up with the rel=next and rel=prev tags. Our SEO company have asked us to implement canonical links on our category pages and leave the rel=next and rel=prev tags as they are.

Our web developers are saying by doing this we are asking Google to ignore all of our products on all of the pages except page 1 which would mean Google would not index a lot of our products. I have looked at a few articles but I am struggling to understand which way to go. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

[Palmbourne]

Dirk

Thank you for your response it is very helpful.

[DirkC]

With rel next/previous you ask Google to consider all the pages with these tags to be considered as one page
With a canonical you indicate that the page is a duplicate (or variation) of the canonical url.

Your developers are right - if you put the first page as canonical for the subsequent pages your are basically asking Google to ignore the 2nd, 3rd,... pages which is in conflict with rel next/previous.

It is possible to combine both canonical & rel next/previous - but not in the way as your SEO company is suggesting. Example from Google:

The canonical in this case is used to strip the sessionid which could be a cause for duplicate content.

Please not that if your category pages are split over a lot of pages (like 100) - the rel / next previous stops making sense. In that case it's probably better to focus on optimising the first page & put a "noindex/follow" on the subsequent pages.

Dirk