Best Practices for Pagination on E-commerce Site

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One of my e-commerce clients has a script enabled on their category pages that allows more products to automatically be displayed as you scroll down. They use this instead of page 1, 2, and a view all.

I'm trying to decide if I want to insist that they change back to the traditional method of multiple pages with a view all button, and then implement rel="next", rel="prev", etc.

I think the current auto method is disorienting for the user, but I can't figure out if it's the same for the spiders.

Does anyone have any experience with this, or thoughts?

Thanks!

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Its easier for the spiders because its all on one page. If the pages are very long they can be divided up by sub segments and all of our existing ecommerce sites will use a search tab at the top which will allow them to fast forward to that page.

Couple of other important items.....Remember that for a customer to scroll through one long page, if the content is interesting, doesnt require them to click on another page and start over....this can be valuable with the proper call  to actions.

It can be a problem if all the content is on one page for "relevancy" if it combines multiple products that are unrelated.....similar to the reason why you would create smaller adgroups within adwords.....if you have a page that is about building supplies and on that same page you have hammers and gas power equipment, you wont get the same "relevancy" value as having separate pages with separate content and separate sitemap designation (one page hand tools-hammers) (one page gas powered equipment-construction heaters, etc.)

Hope this is helpful.

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Thanks! I appreciate your response and understand what you're saying.

In this case, all of the products on the page are relevant and in the same category. And I get that it's best to have only one actual page...I'm just not sure about this auto-scroll feature.

I think I will leave it alone for now, and just keep an eye on our metrics/analytics.

Thanks!

[Everett]

Smallbox,

This reply assumes that the "auto scroll feature" you mention is what is also known as a form of "progressive loading", though progressive loading can also be used to load unseen files like scripts and tracking pixels. On-scroll progressive loading of page content is a standard that more and more websites are using, including Twitter, and Google+ and so web users are getting very used to it. Most don't even notice that it's happening. Thus, I don't think it's a problem.

However, if you're talking hundreds or thousands of products, as opposed to dozens, you may want to provide an alternate viewing option, such as pagination. In that case, you would probably use the View All Canonical method as discussed here, providing your "view all" pages load all of the above-the-fold content within about 3-4 seconds or less: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html .

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Thanks Everett - I was coming to that conclusion, but really just needed some back-up. I appreciate your response!

Emily