What is the danger of adding rel="prev" and rel="next"...

[TheCraig]

Our search results pages are, unfortunately, heavily indexed by Google.  While the long term plan is to replace these somehow with our product pages, in the short term we are doing all we can to improve things.

One of our issues is that we don't have a canonical link or rel="next" or rel="prev" on these pages.

Would like to add these to consolidate duplicate content as well as help Google drill down within these pages to crawl the links within them.

The concern is...  If ten people arrive at our site via:

http://www.oursite.com/?goodstuff=puppies&page=1

and 10 people also arrive at our site via:

http://www.oursite.com/?goodstuff=puppies&page=2

Would adding rel="next" and rel="prev" potentially have a damaging effect on us by removing one of these entry points and therefore removing 10 potential visitors?

Or would it still show both links, but instead would show the canonical in both locations?  In short, could adding these tags actually backfire?

Thanks very much!

Craig

[SErOb]

Check out topic from a few months ago-

http://moz.com/community/q/ecommerce-problem-with-canonicol-rel-next-rel-prev

How old is the site?

In my experience, I've found it best to first see how things are actually being indexed, which pages are showing up in SERPS, and what the user behavior is.