How to handle Meta Tags on Pagination... page 2,3,4....

[paddlej]

Seems that SEOMoz reports are considering my paginated pages as duplicate Meta Tags. For example, I have a product catalog with 5 paginated pages. Obviously the content on each page is unique and the URL ends in =4, =5 for the page number, but the Title and Description are the same for all the pages.

Any suggestions on how to handle this? The pages other than page 1 are not indexed, so it should not be a big deal. But wondering if I should programatically ad the page number to the additional pages to show a difference?

[Gordian]

I ran into this same problem a little while ago.

First off if you have meta no index on them or block with robots.txt then it shouldn't be a big deal if they have duplicate metas or titles, but if you don't and Google simply hasn't indexed them then fixing it could be helpful. For this I have always tried to go by the rule of creating unique metas and titles in all situations. What I did was programatically have the page number auto added to the title at the end and the same with the meta.

Ex.

Title

Blue Widgets Page 2

Meta

Blue widgets are the best, buy them from us. Page 2

While this isnt exactly super helpful to the user it doesnt hurt either, and atleast it will help clear up duplicate meta and duplicate title problems which if you have on the Seomoz reports then you for sure have them in Google WMTs errors as well.

Hope this helps

[AlanBleiweiss]

I routinely do audits on sites with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages.  We've found good results simply by appending the page info to page Title & Description  so:

Designer Handbags | Unique Pocketbooks | Page 3

[EGOL]

Why guess?  Try it and see if they pull any traffic from the SERPs.

Slap a couple of keywords onto the end of the title tag.

[paddlej]

Thanks gents, good stuff.

[DigitalJungle]

Almost all Wordpress  pagination plugins' add "noindex, follow" to page 2,3,4
So Maybe it's better than rel=canonical  , Let me just try!