Should all pagination pages be included in sitemaps

[Saijo.George]

How important is it for a sitemap to include all individual urls for the paginated content. Assuming the rel next and prev tags are set up would it be ok to just have the page 1 in the sitemap ?

[customerparadigm.com]

Saijo-

Ideally, a sitemap has a list of all of the pages on a site in a flattened out structure, so that a search engine is able to view all of the pages quickly and easily.

Typically an eCommerce site will have a structure like this:

• Home Page
• About Page
• Other content pages
• Main Category Page (with pagination), lists sub-categories
     - Sub Category Page (with pagination), lists products (or perhaps another sub-category).
• Individual Product Pages

Best practice seems to be:

• Make sure that all of the content and individual pages on the site are on the sitemap.
• For any page with pagination, link to the "View All" version of the category page (or any page with pagination), where instead of listing 9, 25 or 50 items, it lists all of the information on the page.  That way you don't have to list the paginated pages in the sitemap.
  (Note: if you have thousands of items on one of these "view all" pages, this might not be a viable option because the page load time might be too long and/or contain too many links).

Hope this helps...

• Jeff