How many inner links on one page?

[komeksimas]

I have seen Matt Cutts video about links per page and know that too many links "may" harm the flow of link juice. But what should e-commerce sites do?

We have category pages with more than a few thousands products in each of them. So linking to each of them dilutes the PR flow?

We could use pagination, but doesn't it give a disadvantage in user experience when he needs to go 10 links deep to reach a product? And Google robots won't update the information frequently because it will be on the lowest part of our site?

Now our goal is to make all our products appear like Facebook scroll down page. We know that Google doesn't use Ajax to see more links so robots and all the users that don't have JavaScript could see the paginated results. Is it a good way to put all products and links like this?

[OrionGroup]

I would suggest using Pagination. If you were able to allow the visitor to filter by best selling, most reviewed, newest, lowest price, etc, that might solve the potential problem of having multiple pages if you do decide to use pagination.

However, if you are planning to use Ajax to show the paginated results, that could be a good solution, but the pagination navigation would somehow have to be in regular HTML so the search engines could still spider it.

I'd also recommend using rel=canonical rel=prev rel=next if you do use pagination.

Scott O.

P.S. If you feel I have been helpful, please consider marking this as "Good Answer".

[komeksimas]

We thought about using rel=next/prev and rel=canonical. But would html paginated webpages showing that all the same products are on category main page (where Google bot can't expand to see them) would lie to Google.

And it would be like showing that all my stuff is one some page that bots can't see them. Isn't it called cloaking?

[OrionGroup]

There is always a chance it could be seen as cloaking, but I think this instance is a legitimate reason to do it. You aren't blatantly trying to manipulate the search engines for your gain. You are trying to help the users first and please the search engines second, so I think it should work fine.

[komeksimas]

But rel=canonical is offered only for search engines to learn whether the page is a duplicate or an original.

Maybe there's someone else that could tell their experience about this topic?