Google Rel="Next" & Rel="Prev"

[Lantec]

Hello,

I have a catalogue website and I am implementing the rel="next" and rel="prev" to the website.

My question is that we do have a view all page also, which apparently Google likes over a 'page1'.. Should I add the canonical to this page?

I already have it set to WEBSITEURL/sonos (which is going well) I don’t want to have to change this to [URL]sonos/view-all (which is my view all link) as the first page is getting ranked well I am then telling Google no, the view all page is the parent.

Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

Rick

[SEOmoxy]

Google also likes pages that load quickly. I think you need to balance the "view all" canonical tag with the effects on page weight and load time. I would stick with what's working - lots of paginated sites canonicalize to page 1, even though Google prefers the view all version.

[Dr-Pete]

I wouldn't use rel=next/prev AND canonical to "View All". The canonical will almost definitely overwhelm the weaker rel=next and you'll be showing all search visitors the view all page. There's not a lot of data on rel=next/prev yet, but my testing with clients is going positively. If you aren't currently facing problems, I think I'd give it time to do its job.

Pagination is a tough problem, and Google is not consistent about their preferred methods (some of their reps have gotten in pretty heated arguments on opposite sides). It's more than a little annoying, given how common of a problem it is. The only down side to rel=next/prev is that it's new and Bing currently doesn't support it.