: Pagination for product listing, what to use? "canonical" or "rel-prev-next" or do nothing? I want to make sure my product listing is 10 products per page which are not in a series (link). They

@Samaraweera270

If I start to utilise Rel="prev" and rel="next" should I set page 2 onwards as index,follow or noindex,follow?


Neither. Use rel="prev" etc. throughout the entire paginated series. Obviously page 1 will only have rel="next", and the last page only rel="prev".

There's no need to use noindex anywhere in a series which uses pagination markup. The whole point of the pagination markup is that Google will understand that it's seeing a continuous series of pages, and give preference to the 1st page of that series in search.

Setting index, follow is redundant: this is the search engine's default behaviour.


I want Page 1 in the series as the Main page for Google to send users too and I don't see the point in Google indexing page 2 > 100. What's everyone's view on this?


Page 1 is probably the best landing page for a visitor arriving from search, but you still want Google to crawl the entire series. Someone may link to page 7, or the combination of keywords they search may only occur on page 46.

Again, this is why the pagination markup is there. It allows for Page 1 to be the preferred result in search, without having to effectively discard the rest of the series.


Lastly with the rel="canonical" tag should page 2 to 100 all point back to page 1 in the series or the individual page itself? E.G: /used-audi/page-3/.


If using pagination markup, you don't need rel="canonical" as well, unless you've also got for example some parameter issues that may lead to duplication problems. But that's a separate thing.

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@Marchetta884

Here is what I think (we run a classified site too):


Use rel=next/prev
Don't use noindex/nofollow for page 2 & ownards
Use canonical put the canonical tag should point it to the same page (just removing the sorting information)


And the primary reason is that one should not send mixed signals to Google, by using rel=net/prev you are telling Google that it's a series of data and once you add canonical you confuse Google by saying that this is also duplicate of page 1.

Here is another link for your reference.

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@Rambettina238

The number 1 question: Do you want your pages (products) to be found by the search engines? Do you want the bot re-visit very often and timely to find all your latest updates and provide it to searchers? Then act on visibility, not on artifical limits and noindex.

If the Audi example is similar to your actual page you have a category each as a starter and you can make use of rel=prev/next. It's a hint to Google that there is a relationship between the items (Audi-cars). If you don't do it, Google uses it's own heuristics. But if you have this tool at hand, why rely on the algorithm? Give it a try.

Meta-Data for every page: if you slightly change title and description, which should be very simple (e.g. "Audi cars - page x"), they are unique enough, based on the product listing which is unique anyway. I assume the other content (teasers, banners, etc.) that stays the same is in terms of quantity in an acceptable manner.

Add semantical hints to your product entries like date and time and make use of relevant markup to further optimize the listing.

Concerning the canonical: I personally would not use it unless there's a strong need. If done wrong it can do more harm than good. As the documentation (your link above) says, it's an orthogonal concept to rel=prev/next.

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