What would be the best possible way to optimize pagination of a category.

[NewDelhiSEO]

Hi Guys,

I am a bit undecided what to do with paginated pages (result pages) of a category in an e-commerce site.

Say for example I have a category 'Home Furniture' with url domain.com/home-furniture.
This category has 200 products. If I am displaying 20 products per page I have 10 pages. What would be the best thing to do in this case?

1. Index all pages with canonical domain.com/home-furniture and title, text description of the category intact on all pages.
2. Index all pages separately and use Title 'Used Home Furniture for Sale - Page2'. I cannot change the text description of the category, but the product descriptions will make up the page's unique content.
3. Not index pages 2,3,... etc at all and just keep the main category page.

Please let me know what would you do in this case. This forum uses second option.

[samyakonline123]

I will suggest to index all pages separately with different title that is appropriate to the products category displayed on that particular page. Keep the url rich with individual page products category.

[NewDelhiSEO]

I will suggest to index all pages separately with different title that is appropriate to the products category displayed on that particular page. Keep the url rich with individual page products category.

I am not sure if you understand pagination and why we had to paginate in the first place.
If I have 20 pages for the same category you expect me to write 20 different titles and create 20 different rich urls?
I have contextually linked content on the main category page, should I create content for 20 more pages too?

Ultimately what would I have 20 pages targeting same or similar keywords?
So is that what you are suggesting?

[tstolber]

2. Index all pages separately and use Title 'Used Home Furniture for Sale - Page2'. I cannot change the text description of the category, but the product descriptions will make up the page's unique content.

I would go this route and have the correct pagination markup

As you seem to hint towards in option 1 - the issue is not really canonicalization. I would rather have the pagination issue defined with these similar but still unique (and therefore not canonical) URLs. Overall I think you would get better rankings with this method.