A WebmasterWorld member is working on a site and is running into difficulty with rankings that are dropping. When checking Google Webmaster Tools, the big issue is that the pages have the same meta tags, descriptions, and titles.
What kind of options does the webmaster have to recover his falling rankings?
As Tedster reports, sometimes it may be better not to index paginated pages -- it can cause confusion. Many people agree that indexing the first page may be the best option and then disallowing the second page and subsequent pages from being ranked.
Another proposal from Tedster is to think about the user experience.
The need is to have alternate click paths, beyond offering just one set of paginated results . The key to creating that is to forget about databases autogenerating the entire website, and in fact forget all about technology for the moment. Just think like a visitor. How many ways can you help them find what they might want?
To achieve this, you can categorize the results if possible.
Other people have tried "noindex, follow" and that has worked well for them.
There are many ways to go about it. You need to find the solution that's best for you.
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
