Canonical tags being direct to "page=all" pages for an Ecommerce website

[JMSCC]

I find it alarming that my client has canonical tags pointing to "page=all" product gallery pages. Some of these product gallery pages have over 100 products and I think this could effect load time, especially for mobile. I would like to get some insight from the community on this, thanks!

[GreenStone]

Implementing a rel canonical for a paginated series to a "view all" is certainly recommended practice from a technical standpoint.

With that said, this should be implemented as the recommended course if it enhances user experience. If it takes too long to load, and users abandon the page all together, it helps no one. I would certainly do speed tests, and check the usability of it.

• If it takes longer than a few seconds, I would certainly recommend checking to see if there are ways to speed it up.
• If this proves to be difficult, there is certainly room to consider implementing a paginated series that is more manageable and contains rel=prev and rel=next tags to ensure search engines are aware these pages are a related series.

[PeteC12]

We use both rel=next and rel=prev along with a canonical tag pointing to the view all pages on our eCommerce site. As Greenstone mentions above, this is what google recommends.

We also use a Cloudflare CDN (Content delivery Network) which takes care of any speed issue . They offer a free package which you can use to trial it and the paid packages are also very good value  ,approx $20-30 per month by memory but it does make the website lightening quick. It's very easy to setup to.

Pete

[JMSCC]

The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect, so should I also point my redirects to a "view=all" pages to aggregate Page Authority?

[PeteC12]

I asked John Mueller in a recent hangout about 301 redirects and he stated that if you had multiple 301's from the same domain going to a single point i.e homepage , then google may discount many of those 301's and treat them 404's. In my context , it was as I had done a migration and being lazy I 301'd all the urls to the home t. He was saying to map them like for like or you could lose out.

So I guess it depends on your 301's etc..

Pete

[JMSCC]

Currently my 301's are being directed to relative pages. but for example:

www.shoes.com/category/redshoes.do <------ Current Redirect from (www.shoes.com/category/myredshoes.do)

www.shoes.com/category/redshoes.do=sortby=page1

www.shoes.com/category/redshoes.do=sortby=page2

www.shoes.com/category/redshoes.do=sortby=page=all   <----- **Current Canonical **

www.shoes.com/category/redshoes.do=sortby=page=all   <--Should I Redirect from www.shoes.com/category/redshoes.do

I basically want to distribute my authority to one page and contemplating if redirecting to a "page=all" along with my canonical will improve the overall performance for that page.