Google counting numbers of products on category pages - what about pagination ?

[stukerr]

Hi there,

Whilst checking out the SERPS, as you do, I noticed that where our category page appears, google now seems to be counting the number of products (what it calls items) on the product page and displaying this in the 1st part of the description (see image attached).

My problem is we employ pagination, so that our category page will have 15 items on it, then there are paginated results for the rest, with either ?page=2 or page-2/ etc. appended to the URL. Although this is only a minor issue, I was just wondering if there was a way to change the number of products displayed on that page to be the entire number of products in that category, is there a microformat markup or something that can over-ride what google has detected ?

Furthermore is this system of pagination effective ? I have considered using javascript pagination, such that all products would be loaded on to the one page but hidden until 'paginated', but I was worried about having hidden elements on the page, and also the impact of load times. Although I think this may solve the problem and display the true number of products in a section!

Any help much appreciated,

Stuart

b4urme.jpg

[EGOL]

Just an opinion....

I would increase the number of items to something higher than 15.  Will increase the count that is shown by google and when I visit your site to shop I will not be frustrated by the need to page through categories.  Might conserve linkjuice and prevent a little keyword canibalization.

[modparent]

I agree that maybe a higher default item count might help, but you should also explore your ability to use nofollows to force google to index the category pages with item count "all" instead of 15. most of the time this can be done with some creativity and minor tweaks.

[AlanBleiweiss]

In addition to increasing the number of products as EGOL suggests, I'd also include the number of products directly in the Meta Description field for the primary landing page.  Pagination is important for user experience.  Using Javascript could cause problems with search engines properly discovering all the products.

[stukerr]

Hi thanks for the input, my only concern with doing this would be increasing load times, I think its a case of one optimisation tactic vs. another. Perhaps something like only loading the product images of the products below the fold would help the loading time issue but this then creates issues of its own!