Unnecessary String in URL when advancing pages within a category

[MattS]

There are several category pages on my site that list products - I think there is a max # of products within the theme before an advance page option is created at the bottom of the product list - this advances to another page of products but also appends the URL of the page w/ 'CatListingOffset=24&Offset=24&Per_Page=24&Sort_By =disp_order' - this is allegedly dinging SEO for lengthy URLs. Is there any way to change this so the URL remains unchanged? Is it even worth worrying about?

[RTHOMASDESIGN]

Miva needs those URL parameters for pagination (at least by default). You could always handle pagination with AJAX and submit custom URL values -- but that opens up a whole other can of worms. ReadyThemes ship with a link tag referencing the canonical URL. I'd like to hear more information from the SEO company you're dealing with... you probably wouldn't want the paginated pages to rank, or rank higher than your primary (canonical) page anyway, and it's better to associate the content with the primary page -- although this depends on the intent and how important the content is on the paginated pages. There's a lot of research out there on SEO & pagination – much of which is no longer relevant as the search engines have become increasingly intelligent. If you read about SEO & Pagination, make sure the content was written after mid-2019 (after Google announced it no longer uses rel="next" and rel="prev" as indexing signals).

I don't think you need to worry, but then again I'm not sure what the intent is. There's not really a one-size-fits all solution, but I think Miva has done the best they can.

How many categories do you have that require pagination? How many pages are there for those categories? If there's only two pages, you might look into increasing the default amount of products per page (unless it really impacts page speed).

-Ryan

[Kent Multer]

Some product-list pages use HTML forms instead of URLs with parameters. That prevents the parameters from appearing in the shopper's browser. I'm not sure if it works in all cases, but it's an easy thing to try. If you would like some help with this, you can PM or email me.