Whether to paginate products on an ecommerce site for Google indexing

[conor]

We have recently reorganised all the catagories on a successful ecommerce site and are now faced with some product listing pages that are well over 100 products ( all with unique descriptions for listings and product pages) and well over the recommended 100 links per page. So now we feel we need to paginate them.

The current stucture is

example.com/area.htm

we are considering either to paginate as:

example.com/area.htm example.com/area1.htm , example.com/area2.htm etc

or take the opportunity to rewrite the pagination as:

example.com/area.htm example.com/areakeyword.htm , example.com/keywordarea.htm etc

We of course also have to chose the amount of products to be displayed on each paginated page. Currently we are favoring 23/30 which is the industry norm and seems to be what users expect.

This process will result in a 25-30% increase in indexed pages on the site which already has over 10,000 pages indexed.

I would appreciate your thought and experiences on this on not only whether we should go down the pagination but also how to do it without looking spammy.

[Receptional Andy]

I don't think there's too much danger of looking spammy (maybe with your random keyword filenames ;)) however there's a lot of potential to create largely duplicate pages that have no prospect of performing, and might even dilute the effectiveness of the initial page (page 1).

But that depends on how you split up the pages - if you can do so based on reasonable criteria (e.g grouping products together - categorising them) then you can effectively target a greater range of words. If it's just alphabetical, or page 1 => page 2 => page 3, then I doubt it's going to work out.

[conor]

Thanks Andy

Each paginated page will be a listing of 25-30 unique descriptions written in house and used soley for these listing pages. Thus the content is unique and on topic - it could be ordered alphabeticaly but there are other crieteria available.

The real issue I see is that some of this content has been indexed on the site previously but has and will move locatation again ( which is something I have not done before). Do you see dupe content filtering issues from this?

[edited by: tedster at 1:21 am (utc) on Dec. 11, 2008]