Pagination for product page reviews

[pikka]

Hi,

I am looking to add pagination on product pages (they have lots of reviews on the page). I am considering using rel="next/prev, to connect the series of review pages to the main product page.

I unfortunately don't have a view-all page for these reviews or the option to get one - the reviews refresh on the same product page (by clicking whatever number page of reviews). This means each page has the exact same description content and everything else, but with different reviews. In this case is rel=next a good option?

The format currently would be:

• On example.com/product

link rel="next" href="http://example.com/product?review-p2"

• On example.com/product?review-p2

link rel="prev" href="http://example.com/product, link rel="next" href="http://example.com/product?review-p3 etc.

Would this be a good format for product page reviews? I see rel=nextprev commonly used on ecommerce category/list pages but not really on the paginated reviews on product pages, so I thought I would see if anyone has advice on how best to solve this.

I'm also wondering if it would be best to not combine this with a canonical tag on all the different review pages pointing to the product page, seeing as the reviews are actually different (despite the rest of the content being identical).

I am hoping to pick up longer tail traffic from this, I figure by connecting the pages and not using canonicals that this way I could get more traffic from the phrases used in the reviews. By leaving out the canonicals, is it possible a user searching for phrases that might be deeper in the series, to land on, say, ?review-p4? Any thoughts if this would drive more traffic?

Thanks!.

[mihaiaperghis]

Hey pikka,

You can actually use both rel=next/prev and rel=canonical on the same webpage, but you have to be careful on how you use them.

If you don't have a view-all page, then DO NOT use rel=canonical on the review-pX page to point to the main product page. That's like saying "This page has identical content as the other one, so please disregard this one and use the other instead". It's somewhat of a 301 redirect, which would DEINDEX your review-pX pages.

However, using rel=next/prev is perfectly fine, and it's actually the recommended method when there's no view-all page. You can still use rel=canonical but only to point to the current review page (so basically you would use this just to filter out session IDs or any other parameters that lead to duplicate content).

So, in your case, you should use them like this (let's say we're on page 3):

<-- current page, "clean" url
<-- previous page, can contain parameters
<-- next page, can contain parameters

Do NOT use this:

Hope this helps, here's the Google support page on this issue and Maile Ohye's excellent video explaing it.

PS: Almost forgot, regarding your avatar:

1104.jpg

[pikka]

Thanks Mihai, that's exactly what I was thinking. I'll go ahead with this.

Now that this is all solved I can go relax by the pool and take it easy

D8GBLEi.jpg

[pikka]

Hi Mihai,

Thanks for your reply. I also have parameter URL's on some of these pages, which are mainly used when I send email campaigns to the same targeted pages, but with slightly modified content such as a custom banner on it. These pages are all noindexed but are helpful for targeted campaigns. In these cases the landing page still has the same paginated reviews series at the bottom.

How would I treat these? For example:

http://www.example.com/product?custombanner

In these situations would i use the following for the paginated review URL's?:

http://www.example.com/product?custombanner&review-p2 in conjuction with a canonical tag to http://www.example.com/product?review-p2, or could I just leave it as pointing to http://www.example.com/product?review-p2 (ie no need to have unique review pages for the parameter pages with canonicals)?

Thanks