Best way to Handle Pagination?

[NickPateman81]

At the moment I my blog is paginated like so:

/blogs > /blogs/page/2 > /blogs/page/3 etc

What are the benefits of paginating with dynamic URLs like here on SEOmoz with /blog?page=3

[baptisteplace]

No I meant use /blogs/ as the first page and /blogs/pX for the next pages, X being the pagination number. These pages are valid and are not 301 of course.

BUT, /blogs/p1 is the same as /blogs/ so you should 301.

AND you must be aware of inexistent pages in the pagination (p10000 because you don't have 10000 pages of paginated results; /blogs/p01 or /blogs/p02 because these pages should not exist)

[NickPateman81]

I wouldn't be comfortable 301'ing those pages like you said. I want my users to be able to navigate through earlier posts rather than just being redirected to the blog homepage. Perhaps you mean rel canonical redirect?

[baptisteplace]

This won't make much difference, I usually use these urls though :

/blogs/

/blogs/p2

Remember to 301 /blogs/p1 to /blogs/ and to 404 pages with a page too big /blogs/p10000 or strange urls /blogs/p01

[Goetzman]

I was wondering the same thing and tried it in multiple ways. I got similar results SEO wise, I don't think it ultimately matters. What matters is how it looks to your users and a proper sitemap.

[NickPateman81]

Thanks Dan. I would robots.txt the pages but I still want the links on those pages to flow PR - so I really need to noindex,follow them but WordPress is being difficult!

As for SEO differences, you're probably right. I think I just prefer the look for dynamic URLs than /dir/page

[DanDeceuster]

I don't think it makes a difference either way. One advantage to your current pagination is that if you want to block those pages you can robots.txt block the /page/ directory and that handles that. Not sure how SEOmoz would go about it with those dynamic URLs. From an SEO perspective I don't think it matters either way.