VRL Parameters Question - Exclude? or use a Canonical Tag?

[Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants]

I'm trying to figure something out, as I just finished my "new look" to an old website.  It uses a custom built shopping cart, and the system worked pretty well until about a year when ranking went down.  My primary traffic used to come from top level Brand pages.  Each brand gets sorted by the shopping cart and a Parameter extension is added... So customers can click Page 1 , Page 2 , Page 3 etc.

So for example : http://www.xyz.com/brand.html , http://www.xyz.com/brand.html?page=1 , http://www.xyz.com/brand.html?page=2 and so on... The page= is dynamic, therefore the page title, meta's, etc are the same, however the products displayed are different.

I don't want to exclude the parameter page= completely, as the products are different on each page and obviously I would want the products to be indexed.  However, at the same time my concern is that have these parameters might be causing some confusion an hence why I noticed a drop in google rankings.

I also want to note - with my market, its not needed to break these pages up to target more specific keywords.

Maybe using something like this would be the appropriate measure?

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

I'm not sure I understand your page/structure setup. It is only one brand's products per page right? You say the cart sorts the brands, but what does this mean in practice? Does http://www.xyz.com/brand.html?page=2 always show the products of one specific brand or can it be different brands depending on the sorting? If the first then you shouldn't have a problem, if the latter then yes this could be a problem.

Regardless adding the rel canonical as you describe it is not the way you want to go. This is in effect saying you have only one page/brand you want to index (whichever brand is on http://www.xyz.com/brand.html).

[Southbay_Carnivorous_Plants]

Gotcha on the canonical - that makes sense.

but in terms of the page/structure.  essentially, loading 100 products on one page does not look good in my opinion.  So use pages so i can display 20-25 products

http://www.xyz.com/brand.html?page=1 , would show the first 20 , http://www.xyz.com/brand.html?page=2 would show the next 20 ... and so on.

depending on the brand... there would be anywhere from 2-8 pages , therefore 2-8 duplicate titles/descriptions and possibly leading to indexing problems.

all of the text content and h1 is only shown on http://www.xyz.com/brand.html , and excluded from anything like http://www.xyz.com/brand.html?page=2   ... this is why i am looking for a way to sort of prioritize the main page for indexing purposes.

~thx

[LynnPatchett]

Ah ok now I understand, misread it a bit.

Well, 2 ways to do it then:

1. Rel canonical to a 'view all products page', in this case the rel canonical is a valid option.

2. Implement pagination with rel next/prev - this will work also.

The preferred option would usually be the first, but this does mean that search visitors would normally be landing on the all products view. Depends on how many products each brand has to a degree, how user friendly seeing all the products together is, page load times etc.

Check out this page for a good rundown on the options and implementation.