Need for a modified meta-description every page for paginated content?

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

I'm currently working on a site, where there url structure which is something like: www.domain.com/catagory?page=4. With ~15 results per page.

The pages all canonical to www.domain.com/catagory, with rel next and rel prev to www.domain.com/catagory?page=5 and www.domain.com/catagory?page=3

Webmaster tools flags these all as duplicate meta descriptions, So I wondered if there is value in appending the page number to the end of the description, (as we have with the title for the same reason) or if I am using a sub-optimal url structure.

Any advice?

[jws8118]

It sounds like you have canonical and rel next/prev setup correctly so you shouldn't worry about duplicate meta descriptions.  You could add ?page= as a query string to "ignore" in WMT and then it will ignore those pages and you won't be getting any errors from duplicate meta's on those pages.

Hope this helps,

[OrionGroup]

I believe appending the page number, for example: (Page 3 of 5) to the end of the meta description would suffice from SEOmoz's crawler's or GWT's perspective, however, the best would be to have the ability to create completely unique meta descriptions.

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

Could ignore cause any problems? (such as pages that should/shouldn't be indexed) I was rather suprised to discover that using cannonical wasn't enough.

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

That scale of unique descriptions is well beyond our capacity. We're actually considering dropping the number of items per page too.

Thanks for the help.

[danatanseo]

Do you have "View All" as an option for your paginated pages? If not, you might consider it, and then just include the "View all" version of the page in your site map. Just a thought...

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

We don't have a view all page(We found them so slow, so long, and with so meny links we had a notable improvement in rankings in general when switching to the quicker paginated versions). And other then the first page none of the other pages are currently in our site map.

I'm not entirely sure how that would stop gwt flagging it as a duplicate meta though. Less you imply to also no-index them.