Should I set paramters to maximize the number of producs on all category pages for a retail website?

[apsltd]

We have a retail website with over 20K products and do many things to reduce duplicate content including canonicals & parameters.  In setting up parameters in Google Search Console, we have told Google to ignore the option to list more products, so the category pages that are indexed have only the default 12 products on them.

I don’t want to create too much duplicate product content by doing this, but if there are only 12 products on a category page, the content is very thin  Is it better to have as much product content as possible?

My question: Should we set the parameter to follow the default (12 products) or should set it to 200 so there are more products associated with the category page?

[abhigarapati]

Hi,

It is always better to maintain integrity of your website by limiting the query parameters and avoiding duplicate content.

In your scenario it is always better to maintain 12 products with the default setting. If you go for other than this it will hurt your site rather then boost the things.

[apsltd]

Aghi,

Thanks,  We ended up keeping it to 12 products a page and going with rel="next" and rel="prev", and turning off cononicals

This article was helpful:

https://paulnrogers.com/magento-technical-seo-issues-to-look-out-for/

[Everett]

Hello Kory,

How many products per page are you showing visitors? 12? In my experience, shoppers prefer to see more products on fewer pages. The best user experience would be to see them all on one page with more products progressively loading onto the page as the user scrolls down. This would be a "View All" canonical situation, which Google suggests for fast-loading websites.

Since Magento isn't particularly fast, and because you have a very large catalog, I wouldn't advise a "View All Canonical" in your situation. However, you could certainly load more than 12 products per page. You could double that and cut in half the amount of paginated pages Googlebot has to load in order to find all of the products in each category.

Another thing I recommend is putting static category introduction content on the first page, but not on subsquent pages, and to customize the Title tag on all pages by adding in the page number. These two things cut down the duplicate content risks.

And of course keep rel next prev and your Noindex,Follow tags on paginated pages.

All set?