Pagination and links per page issue.

[Mulith]

Hi all,

I have a listings based website that just doesn't seem to want to pass rank to the inner pages.

See here for an example:

http://www.business4sale.co.uk/Buy/Hotels-For-Sale-in-the-UK

I know that there are far too many links on this page and I am working on reducing the number by altering my grid classes to output fewer links.

The page also displays a number of links to other page numbers for these results. My script adds the string " - Page2" to the end of the title, description and URL when the user clicks on page two of these results.

My question is:

Would an excessive amount(200+) of links on a page result in less PR being passed to this page(looking spammy)?

And would using rel canonical on page numbers greater than 1 result in better trust/ranking?

Thanks in advance.

[poolguy]

200 links on a page isn't that bad.  Once you get to 250+ I would rethink the architecture.

Yes, you should use rel canonical on your pagination pages.

A good way to pass ranking between deep pages like this is to have a section at the bottom that offers similar listings in the area.  This way you are giving the bots multiple ways to find each listing, rather than just from one page/category.  Do it like this - http://www.estatesgazette.com/propertylink/advert/kensingtonrooms_hotel-_131_137_cromwell_road_london_sw7_4du-3264453.htm.  They have a "More Properties from this Advertiser" section.

[Mulith]

But would rel canonical make listing on page 2 and above unindexible?

Listings are added chronologically on my site and I still want crawlers to be able to reach adverts created  years ago, these listing a could be on page 100, surely rel canonical tells engines not to crawl the page  as it is not the canonical version?

[poolguy]

I'm sorry, what I meant was you should make the pagination pages canonical themselves, like for Page 2...

[dunklea]

Rel canonical doesn't tell engines not to crawl the page (the mata tag nofollow does that), but rather just tells the engine not to index the page in place of the 1st page of your pager results. This helps reduce duplicate content penalties and consolidates your PA onto a single URL. I could be wrong, but I imagine you would also prefer organic users to go to the first page of results rather than, say, page 6.

The result is that engines will still crawl your pages and find your listings (and index those), but only index the first page of your listing page.

I hope that helps to clarify things!

Andrew

[AlanMosley]

I believe the number 100 is the limit of links in a page. and yes the more links the less pr being passed to each page.

But 100 links on the home page means means you can have 100 child pages with 100 links on each means 10,000 links only 2 clicks from home page.

as for re=canonical, is page 2 unique? then yes just as you would for any other page.

I assume you are aware of the flat link stucture, if not I think this page though old is a must.
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

Its a long read, but very imformative