Best Way to Break Down Paginated Content?

[sbrault74]

(Sorry for my english)

I have lots of user reviews on my website and in some cases, there are more than a thousand reviews for a single product/service. I am looking for the best way to break down these reviews in several sub-pages.

Here are the options I thought of:

1. Break down reviews into multiple pages / URL

http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page1
http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page2
etc...

In this case, each page would be indexed by search engines.

• Pros: all the reviews are getting indexed
• Cons: It will be harder to rank for "blue widget review" as their will be many similar pages

2. Break down reviews into multiple pages / URL with noindex + canonical tag

http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page1
http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page2
etc...

In this case, each page would be set to noindex and the canonical tag would point to the first review page.

• Pros: only one URL can potentially rank for "blue widget review"
• Cons: Subpages are not indexed

3. Load all the reviews into one page and handle pagination using Javascript

reviews, reviews, reviews
more reviews, more reviews, more reviews
etc...

Each page would be loaded in a different

which would be shown or hidden using Javascript when browsing through the pages. Could that be considered as cloaking?!?

• Pros: all the reviews are getting indexed
• Cons: large page size (kb) - maybe too large for search engines?

4. Load only the first page and load sub-pages dynamically using AJAX

Display only the first review page on initial load. I would use AJAX to load additional reviews into the

. It would be similar to some blog commenting systems where you have to click on "Load more comments" to see all the comments.

• Pros: Fast initial loading time + faster loading time for subpages = better user experience
• Cons: Only the first review page is indexed by search engines

=========================================================

My main competitor who's achieving great rankings (no black hat of course) is using technique #3.

What's your opinion?

[howardd]

Check out these pages by Google that talk about Pagination: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en and http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

In your case, the best way would be to use rel="next" and rel="prev" tags.

Are you using wordpress? If so, the Yoast plugin will take care of this for you.

Howard

[FedeEinhorn]

I think you are forgetting that engines are capable of running Javascript just fine, and all the content that is brought via AJAX to be viewable to the user will also be indexed by search engines.

I would certainly go with option 4, it's a standard Today, but have a look at the "pushState", that and address manipulation, that way, your users will be able to access an exact review (say in page 3) by just typing the address: http://www.mysite.com/blue-widget-review-page3 and have by default the page 3 loaded.
If you go this route, you can also put a hidden (css'ed) NEXT PAGE button at the end to link to the next page.

Hope that helps!