Canonical and pagination

[nickson]

I stumbled upon the canonical url lately and cant really figure out if it is working correctly.

Whenever I use the pagination functions in category view the canonical url stays the same. This just doesn't seem right. Because that way only the first page of each category will be indexed right?

Also I don't see a rel next or rel prev in the source code.

Isn't the canonical used to give google a link witch shows all products?

[jjk]

Isn't the canonical used to give google a link witch shows all products?

No, the canonical url is used to point the search engines to the primary url, in case a page is accessible through various urls, which usually is the case in CMS systems and online shops.

The search engines follow links and in this case the search engines 'see' the pagination links which they crawl to find your product pages.