SEO - View All Items in categories or no?

[cbsteven]

I am considering enabling "view all" by default on my categories. As I see it, the main benefit is that Google will have fewer pages to navigate to which might dilute the site's Page Rank. It will get all of the key words from all the product listings into the category's main landing page.

The main downside is that some of these top-level have hundreds or even a couple of thousands of products in them. It would probably slow down page loads.

I use SearchSpring so the user wouldn't actually see the list of all the products. The SearchSpring category page would replace the built-in one after the page loads.

Any thoughts on the SEO benefit of doing this?

[DeanP]

If the purpose of your change is for SEO, I don't think you should do it.

Google knows that you have an e-commerce site, and it knows that your content is the same, regardless of how or if you have it paginated.

The more important aspect to consider is human user experience and, like you said, load times could become an issue if you display hundreds of products at once. Not to mention the entirely unnecessary increase in bandwidth use.

Additionally, if a customer navigates or is linked to a category containing a relevant product, that experience becomes counterproductive if the visitor can't find the product among hundreds of others.