In response to an exquiry I decided to have a go at coding up a system of pagination for the “New Product for month” module that is shown on the index page of osCommerce sites.
With a little change in the php code of the module I managed to get it to work;
And here is a Youtube showing it in action;
For SEO purposes and page management, pagination should be avoided whenever possible. For instance Google will report the page-2,3 etc, most likely as pages with duplicate titles or duplicate meta-tags. It is way harder to create appropriate tags with pagination.
Perhaps with some jquery and ajax the pagination links could be invisible to spiders but still you want to offer better navigation to customers. A use of drop-downs to filter products by type or some other type of facet navigation will be better along with jquery so spiders won’t see them and treat them as different pages.
That’s of course my opinion.
Hi Mark – could use rel nofollow maybe?
Technically you could but I don’t know of the results. Google has changed the nofollow attribute. In a page, it used to divide the page rank among the links excluding the ones with nofollow. Now I am reading they may divide the page rank among all links including the nofollow. And so to be on the safe side I use jquery so the links can be used by humans but spiders cannot see them.
hello Gary, have you implemented this pagination on a website? Can you teach me how did you do it please?
It was done, but I don’t remember it off the top of my head. If you want me to dig out the code, can do for a few beers. Email me on oscshops at gmail dot com