Pagination of internal link page

[uberslacker]

Hello,

I have a main menu link that goes to the most popular part of my site, which I'll call "Cool items". The Cool Item page is a listing of links to 200 content pages on my site, each about something different. Up until now I have been showing 50 of these links per page.

So you go to the Cool Item page, and see 50 of the content links in the center of the page, then there are next buttons on the bottom to go to the next 50 content links.

I was curious if it would be a better SEO best practice to list all 200 links on the Cool Items page without requiring pagination?

[Robert Charlton]

You might try categorization instead... putting these items into sections, where the links pages themselves might attract inbounds. This would certainly be better than 1, 2, 3, 4 type links.

The arrangement would also allow you to link internally to some of the deeper links pages from elsewhere on your site to boost those up... and you'd have some topically useful anchor text as well.

[uberslacker]

I was considering that. I'm not sure if I can do it in my CMS gracefully at the moment (and not sure how I'd categorize them yet or if I'd want to go that route). While I investigate this, what would you recommend for the time being between the current pagination and the option of displaying it all on the same page?

Thanks for your advice Robert.

[mack]

Im with Robert on this one. Some sort of category system would make the section of your site a lot more useful to the end user. It would also mean you where linking to related sites from each page of your mini directory.

As you said it may depend on your CMS, but a lot of CMS systems do have the option, either out the box or by using a "plugin" to run a directory or sites.

Mack.

[uberslacker]

I hear that. This isn't like a directory listing though. This is the actual content of my site. So, for a theoretical example, imagine my site is about Presidential History. Then each link on that main category page is to a page of my own content on the site that I wrote about a presidency for instance. I'll definitely continue to think of how I can better categorize it, but for my site, I'm not sure if I want to categorize it yet.

In my cms I could create multiple categories, but I'm afraid that if I move content into the new categories, then the url's will change, which is a pain. Decisions decisions....no one said being a webmaster is easy :)