Ranking of pages within a category

[Bluerivertraders]

I was wondering if anyone has had an experience or advice on pages within a category. Lets say you have a category with 45 items in it split into 3 pages. Will search engines see this any differently than if all 45 items were on one long page?

[bristweb]

it sounds like you are trying to decide if the search engine will prefer to see all items on one page, or split into multiple pages

short answer
just do what you think is best for user experience

somewhat longer answer

first, search engines do not have a specific rule for length of page or link depth of your site. depending on the credibility your site has with search engines, they may go deeper in your site and further down on the page. if your site isn't very credible, very long pages, or pages buried deep in your site may not get indexed.

so what to do? USE THE SITEMAP tool. this way google and other search engines will have a list of all the pages on your site...and therefore they will likely crawl all of those pages.

also, i would suggest the best user experience is what you should aim for. if separating your pages is helpful, then separate them. but also remember that you don't want to force your visitors to click 10 times just to find anything!