Pagination, Canonical Tag & Best Practices

[alrockn]

I have an eCommerce site that dynamically creates category pages, which produce canonical tags in the header.  For multiple page categories, it adds the page number to the URL.  For example, this category has 3 pages....

Because most categories have too many products, I can't follow Googles suggestion of creating a "view all" page. Furthermore since all these pages use the same template, I'm unable to insert a NOINDEX tag in all the pages after the first page.  Also, in this scenario, I'm unable to insert the discreet code for Next/Previous, which is also suggested by Google.

My only option for maintaining these dynamically generated category pages would be to hardcode the first conical tag in the template, which would then be produced on all subsequent paginated pages.

Consequently, every paginated page in this category would have the same canonical tag pointing to the first page.  Would this incur the wrath of Google and would I'd be better off leaving the pagination they way it is?

[mosquitohawk]

Greetings alrockn!

You do have quite the dilemma here.  I actually think you will have problems if you leave it all as-is; you're between a rock and a hard place!

Most e-commerce programs do a terrible job on the technical SEO front out of the box and require some degree of customization to get it all straightened out.  The pagination of category pages is a very common problem.  I will take your word for it that you cannot modify your template(s) but any reasonable suggestion I think is going to require some degree of template modification.

The problem you're most likely going to run into is a thin content issue on your category pages.  I'm assuming all of those paginated page versions would also have the same category description (if any) and if there is nothing unique about your main page Google is likely to ignore it.

To address your question on hard coding the first page as the canonical, I think that is really the only option you have.  You'll want to make sure that category page does have some level of unique content on it (ie: category description text) so it is unique enough to attract Google's attention.

Could you not do some conditional coding to check the page version and modify the canonical accordingly?

[alrockn]

Thanks for your insight Marty.  What I've discovered, that categores with the most pages, are the ones most adversely affected.  For instance, if a category has 20 pages, it ranks horribly, whereas a category with only 1 to 3 pages does good.  Consequently, I think I'm running into a duplication threshold penalty on the larger categories.  Figure since I have nothing to lose, I may try hard coding on a couple of the 20+ page categories and sees what happens.

[mosquitohawk]

Yes it doesn't surprise me you'd be having problems on those higher page categories.  Testing is always the way to go when in doubt.  Out of curiosity, what e-commerce system are you using?

[alrockn]

PDG-Commerce