REL prev/next on pages with additional sort parameters

[Peter264]

We need a bit of advice on a site we are working on.

Currently, the site displays items in the categories in order of date and all of the pages of the category listing are rel prev/next tagged correctly.

This is great, and works really well - however we want to include some more sorting options (by popularity, name, file size... etc) into the mix.

What's the best way to go about this using the correct tags?  Is it better to NOINDEX all of the sorting options and just leave the default by date listings indexed?

Also, we cannot canonical the sorted options to their counterparts because the page content would be different.

Any ideas?  Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[danatanseo]

Hi Peter,
Do you have a "View All" page option? If so, you could just use a canonical tag on the "view all" version of the page, without doing anything further.

Here are some helpful resources (the video from Google is very good):

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/mitigating-mixed-signals-effectively-consolidating-paginated-urls

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744

Hope this helps!

[Peter264]

Thanks for the reply Dana.  No, a view-all page is not an option, some of the categories have over 11,000 items - so we can rule that out!

I've looked at all of the existing resources, and while all of them offer great advice, nothing touches on the subject of multiple sort options - they seem to be only for standard page 1, page 2... etc listings.

The link you provided to the YouMoz post we have read through thoroughly and they do it a little differently.  In their example, they sort the items on the current page, while our sort options would change the order of the entire category, therefore we can't use canonical... as the page content is 100% different.

We want to work with multiple sort options and wanted to know the best way to do this.