Which Pagination/Canonicalization Page Selection Approach Should be Used?

[Oxfordcomma]

Currently working on a retail site that has a product category page with a series of pages related to each other i.e. page 1, page 2, page 3 and Show All page. These are being identified as duplicate content/title pages.  I want to resolve this through the applications of pagination to the pages so that crawlers know that these pages belong to the same series. In addition to this I also want to apply canonicalization to point to one page as the one true result that rules them all. All pages have equal weight but I am leaning towards pointing at the ‘Show All’. Catch is that products consistently change meaning that I am sometimes dealing with 4 pages including Show All, and other times I am only dealing with one page (...so actually I should point to page 1 to play it safe).  Silly question, but is there a hard and fast rule to setting up this lead page rule?

[TextMarketing]

Hey there,

If each page has unique content, you don't want to use canonicalization as you wont get the "SEO Juice" from each individual page.

What I would do is modify the page title for each page.
For example, "Green Widgets - Page 2 | Cheapwidgets.com"

Does that make sense?

[NitinRGoyal]

You should rel=canonical only in cases you have duplicate content, which may be case when

1. You want to have both pages available

2. You have similar content due to some choices at your page- you have pages for 10 items and 20 items per page while this list has only 5 items in it so both pages showing same content.

3. You need to control the level of parameters you want search engines to take care of. For e.g. you have 3 parameters state, city, street but as taking all three together will give you a lot of data so you may be just going upto city even when street was there in URL.

Also you should use re=prev and rel=next for URLs with pagination.

You can read more about it at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

[Oxfordcomma]

Firstly, thanks for the response. I think I was not clear enough in my explanation. I am currently dealing with a category page for towels - showing the full mix of towels (make and brand) that the site has to offer, 50+ products e.g.

/towels (aka /towels-p1)
/towels-p2
/towels-p3
/towels-show-all (show all allows you to view all results from above pages)

Meta details attached to the above are from the one source hence duplication issues.

This is why I thought poagination/canonicalization would be applicable. Thanks for reviewing my question.

[Everett]

Hello Oxfordcomma,

If you have fast page load times on the view all pages you can make those canonical. This is Google's recommendation: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html .

If those pages can be large and cause latency issues (slow loading) the better option would be rel next/prev and none of them would be "canonical" for the others, as they would each stand on their own. You may consider at that point adding a robots noindex,follow tag to the View All page, but Google generally does a very good job of figuring this out on their own and I prefer to let them do it.

In summary: If you have good View All pages with fast load times use those as canonical, regardless of how many products you have (e.g. 5 or 25) as long as no latency issues are apparent. Use this tool to test it: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights . If the View All pages are too big for most of your categories to load fast go with Rel Next Prev.

Rel Next Prev info:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

View All Canonical info:

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

It can get a little more complicated if you are dealing with pagination AND faceted search or multiple URL parameters acting as filters.