Paginated Pages - Best advice

[zoltan]

Let's suppose you have a classified ads website for widgets. The site have tens of categories: green widgets, blue widgets, etc. These pages contains hundreds of classified ads related to green widgets, blue widgets. Of course, you can only list 10-20 classified ad links on every category page so pagination is required. The question is: what to do with paginated pages? Noindex them? Nofollow them? Both?

I want each specific classified ad to be crawled and indexed + the main category pages (without pagination). What is the optimal way to do this? So far, all my paginated pages are indexed by google but they all have different titles and meta tags (green widgets - from 11 to 20). Is this OK, or I should better keep one page (the non paginated one) in the google index?

[chrisains]

Can you explain the reasons why you think pagination is potentially causing an issue? Generally pagination leads to issues of Title/Meta/content duplication however you have said the Titles and Meta tags are different on each page therefore this isn't specifically an issue for you.

If you have the ability, ensure each page is as unique as possible i.e. tailor the Title and Meta tags towards each page and the pagination shouldn't be a major issue.

[tedster]

One of the approaches that some sites find helpful is using the canonical link tag to point all the deeper paginated URLs to page one. That is another tool to think about, but in your case it might be a problem.

Does every classified ad appear have its own dedicated page? And if so, are the paginated pages the only click path to those individual ads?

[zoltan]

Tedster, yes every classified ad has a dedicated page. Yes, as more and more ads are posted, obviously new classified ads (and links to the dedicated page) appear on the non paginated page and the rest are moved to paginated pages. The problem is that in certain locations / categories where I have many ads, the titles of the pages look similar although they are different. So, I have a page with "London Green Widgets" title and maybe tens of more "London Green Widgets - from 11 to 20", "London Green Widgets - from 21 to 30", etc.

Can this be a problem related to Panda? Is it better to noindex all paginated pages (which contain the word from)? If these are noindexed, they are still followed and Googlebot still sees the link to classified ad. Am I right?

So, my question is: is it a good idea to noindex all paginated pages?

[tedster]

I'd say yes - noindex,follow might be worth a try in your case. Of course, I'm not seeing everything you are, but it sounds good on the surface.