Landing Pages: show all or pagination?

[MelissaLB]

Hi all!

Today we finally fixed an oversight we had in re-designing our site a few months back and switched a column of internal links from 302 redirects (they were handled this way so that we could track clicks in our admin panel) to permanent internal links. We changed them today so that google would understand which categories on our site we view to be most important (to create a shorter click path).

Doing this made me realize we have a few options and I'm a little fuzzy on which to choose so I have a 2 part question:

1) For each category we have linked to there are multiple pages of pagination with 12 items per page. Should we use the 'show all' page as the landing page to then create a shorter click path to each of those products or should we use the shortest version of the url for that category which is the 1st page of pagination?

2) IF we should use the 'show all' page as a landing page, does it make any difference at all that that particular page is noindex, follow? (all pages of pagination are noindex,follow except for the first page which is index,follow)

Thanks guys!

[deadsea]

There have been a couple threads on pagination here in the last couple weeks. I personally don't like pagination. Here is what I like to do instead for a category of widgets with a couple hundred products in it:

1) Remove pagination entirely, 301 redirect pages 2 and greater back to page 1.

2) Create category filters. Allow users to apply combinations of filters using AJAX. Create crawl-able pages for key individual filters. Base the crawl-able filter pages on which are important to users, which have search volume according to adwords keyword suggestion tool, and which get the range of widgets well represented between the pages. For example:
Brand X Widgets
Brand Y Widgets
Feature A Widgets
Feature B Widgets
Red Widgets
Blue Widgets
Budget Widgets
Luxury Widgets

3) Link each product to other related products. This passes pagerank around much more efficiently than pagination. There are lots of ways to do this.
People who viewed this widget also viewed...
Other widgets by the same brand...
Other widgets with the same feature..

Advantages of pagination:
* Easy to implement
* Gets everything crawled and indexed

Disadvantages of pagination:
* Not typically used by users
* Not good at passing pagerank to products beyond page 1
* Creates many category pages with duplicate or similar titles
* Pagination pages actually use up some pagerank that you would rather have on keyword targeted pages.

Your "show all" page can be good if you don't have too many products on it and you don't show too much information about each product. I'd try to keep the page size to 2MB and ensure that the top of the page starts rendering before the entire page is downloaded (if more than 100 products). I had a competitor with a page with 2000 products on it. It takes a little while to download, but users that do wait for it get a great experience. My competitor implemented javascript filtering of the products on the page. Filtering and drilling down to the product you want is zippy fast.

Other recent threads on pagination to check out:
Canonical and duplicate content from pagination [webmasterworld.com]
Canonical URL tags and INDEX on Pagination? [webmasterworld.com]

[Planet13]

I agree 100% with deadsea on this.

I would only change the verbiage around the related products to something like:

People who liked this item also liked:

Just because it shows "social validation" by using the word "like" (although it can confuse some people who automatically associate it with a facebook like).