Pagination for Ecommerce Site - How do I fix this?

[KristyO]

Hi Everyone...

I'm having issues on how I should fix the pagination on my ecommerce site

http://www.moondoggieinc.com

Right now I have rel="canonical" putting them all back to the main page like on:

http://www.moondoggieinc.com/dog-harness.php

but there are also some shop all categories like:

http://www.moondoggieinc.com/products.php?cat=all+dog+harnesses

But I wish I could get it so that the content only showed on the first page of them all and then just the products showed in the pagination after that. I have no clue how to make this happen successfully. I know this is a big problem with the structure to the site, creating some duplicate content and such, and I was wondering how I can even begin to go ahead and start tackling this. My background is as a designer so I'm just learning both seo, and anyhting past html / css, so I could really use any help you guys can offer.

THANK YOU!

KristyO

[CleverPhD]

Hey there Kristy O,

You want to noindex follow meta tag your paginated pages beyond page 1 as you want Page 1 of a series of pages to rank for the keywords that you are optimizing for.  By preventing pages 2 though X on a given series from being indexed you "clear up" for Google what pages you want it to focus on.

You have Google follow the links on all of those pages as they all point to product pages that you do want to have indexed and ranked.  There is also the rel next and prev attributes, but I like the noindex follow meta tag approach as it gives me more control.  I

If you want to use the canonical tag in this situation.  It was recommended that you use the Canonical to link back to a master page that contains everything on page 1,2,3,4 X.   They want you to use canonical to have the parts point back to a whole.  On most larger sites this is not practical as to load a page with everything on it would take too long.

See here for when to use view all page vs not

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

I think that the use of the canonical in this case was more for a 3 part article vs pages after pages of a product catalog.

I really only use the canonical to help with things like having the printer friendly version point back to the main version etc.

If you want the Guru on pagination - Google Adam Audette

http://searchengineland.com/five-step-strategy-for-solving-seo-pagination-problems-95494

Good luck!