Ecommerce internal search results pages

[ang]

I'm working on a ecommerce site that allows product search results pages to be sorted a variety of ways (best selling, newest, by price). Each of these search filters creates a new url i.e. /all/best/1 and /all/best/2; /all/new/1 and /all/new/2; etc. These search results pages have been indexed and the site is receiving enough organic traffic from these pages that I don't want to add noindex,follow to them. I am planning on implementing rel=prev,rel=next for each filter, but I'm concerned about duplicate content considering I can't create unique meta data for each page. Should I canonical all pages to the first search results page without filters applied? Or any other ideas on how I should proceed?

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Angela,

Officially google recommend that for search results without filters you should use either a rel canonical to a 'view all' results pages OR rel prev/next (not both in other words). Now with filters that changes slightly and then you should implement rel prev/next as normal but also rel canonical each filtered page to its relevant NON filtered page.

So for example you have:

Page is /all/best/2** and **meta data is:

So you rel canonical not to the first non filtered page as you mention but to the relevant paginated non filtered page if you see what I mean. It can get a bit confusing, be sure to check the final results well to avoid unpleasant surprises.

Hope that helps!