Rel="prev" and view all question

[IanTheScot]

Okay, I've read the posts by Google about the new prev, next tags  and the suggestion for using a view all option.

I've also read the posts here on SEOMoz on the topic but none of them quite address what we have.

First, Some of our  main categories are very large (over 6000 pieces of jewelry) so a view all option would take forever to load be completely useless to a visitor.

Second, our category home pages provide (here's an example

• A description of the category with links to important sections and articles
• A row of new items
• A dozen of the popular items from the category.
• Links to related articles if applicable.

So we have a real category home page with content instead of just categories that start immediately with pages of product.

Should we set the canonical url for all of the browse pages to the main category page, create a view all page or just use the next and previous rel tags with the category home pages as the first in the series?

[irvingw]

I know there are many opinions on how to handle paginated pages. My opinion is to just use a noindex, follow meta tag on all the paginated pages. The thinking is that these pages don't have any intrinsic value of being in the index themselves, but you still want the engines to be able to crawl to all your products from your internal links. I would only use the next and previous tags on paginated articles or galleries. The canonical tag is meant for duplicate pages and doesn't really make sense to use for paginated pages.