Is a canonical tag the best solution for multiple search listing pages in a site?

[JoshKimber]

I have a site where dozens of page listings are showing in my report with a parameter showing the page number for the listings.  Is the best solution to canonical these page listings back a core page (all-products)?  Or, do I change my site configuration in Webmasters to ignore "page" parameters?  What's the solution?

Example URL 1- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=84

Example URL 2- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=85

Example URL 3- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=86

Thanks in advance for your direction.

[LesleyPaone]

Like the taco commercial says "Why not do both" seriously, that is what I would do. What cart / cms are you using? I have a trick I have done on a few sites that does a 1up to google on that one. Here is what I do (if it is possible in your cart /cms)

On an e-commerce site, there are some fairly common searches. The cart that i develop in actually saves the searches and how many times people have searched them. What I do is find the top 10 or so and use the htaccess to rewrite the url of the search. So instead of it being like http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?search=ipod have that rewritten to http://mydomain.com/products/all-products/ipod you can do the same for categories as well, which I think is what you are working with. The only thing you have to keep in mind, is most cms / carts will use the same title and meta description for the pages. So you can either write an override or a module that prints out what you want for the meta information on the search pages. Its pretty crafty, but it works well once you get it down.

[JoshKimber]

When you say "have that rewritten", you mean just rewrite the URL to remove the "?search=" ...right?  Awesome.  Thanks for the answer.

[LesleyPaone]

Correct, it is a pita to do, but if you do things correctly and have an array that you can draw meta information from, it will get indexed. That is what we all want, instead of making a category of "red ipods" you can just have the search for "red pods" indexed, while disallowing anything from ?search=other term