What to do with blog pagination / categories

[vortexuk]

On our new website we are going to have a blog that is custom built.  However, you can browse the general blog with pagination.  You can also nest into the categories or by month.  Doing each will have a different link:

Category: www.mywebsite.com/blog/web-guides/Month: www.mywebsite.com/blog/2014/january/

My question is what is the best thing to do with these pages.  Rel Canonical them to the blog home? Or nofollow/noindex them? Will Google not see these as duplicate content pages?

[William.Lau]

Google's fairly well at understanding pagination. You can either rel=canonical, rel next/prev or just simply leave them alone.

As for categories, i'd leave them as is, since you would typically want your categories to rank for the category keyword.

[iSTORM-New-Media]

Depending on how often (how little) you update the blog it could technically been seen as duplicate content. Pagination (rel=next/prev) doesn't apply to those category pages, but you definitely do want them indexed so don't noindex or rel=canonical them.

Your archive pages are that important, but you don't really need to noindex them also. If you end up finding that the archive pages are duplicating some of your regular blog pages or category pages, then throw a noindex,follow on them.

Hope this helps!