Question Blog creating duplicate blog pages plus duplicate meta title plus duplicate meta description

[seoguy1]

Hi there

Is there a chance that you could provide some thoughts on this please?

The blog page is Indexed with no problem. There are lots of blog posts which continue on pages 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 with no problems.

/ example-site-name/blog
/ example-site-name/blog/page/2
/ example-site-name/blog/page/3
/ example-site-name/blog/page/4
/ example-site-name/blog/page/5
/ example-site-name/blog/page/6
The same thing happens for the shop URL...

/ example-site-name/shop
/ example-site-name/shop/page/2

On crawl analysis though it seems that the blog plus all the other pages (2 to 6) are also indexed. As the title to this thread suggests, the metas used for the blog are also used for the other blog pages. I don't think it is necessary to have pages 2 to 6 indexed though it can't be a bad thing since each page has a different URL and different snippets of blog posts so there is no duplicate content on any of the blog pages.

I could no-follow pages 2 to 6 but I don't want to at this point for the above reasons unless you know of a really good reason to do so which I might not be aware of? If anyone could help with the best way forward on how to create different metas for each blog page that would be really helpful. So I'm a little confused as to what to do here for the best, and whether I should create the different metas for pages 2 to 6 (if I knew how), or if best practice would be to no-follow pages 2 to 6.

Please can anyone provide any useful information and feedback - I'd be really grateful I have been researching with no real answers. SEO Yoast is being used for the site.

I appreciate your time.

Best Regards.

 

[seoguy1]

HI I found the solution myself - thank you anyhow.

When a search engine crawls page one of an archive, it needs to know it’s a paginated archive.
Should page 2 and further of an archive have a canonical link to page 1, or to itself? The idea was that you mostly want visitors to end up on page 1 of an archive. That page is usually the most relevant for the majority of users. Google is very clear now: each page within a paginated series should canonicalize to itself, so /page/2/ has a canonical pointing to /page/2/. For a while, SEOs thought it might be a good idea to add a noindex robots meta tag to page 2 and further of a paginated archive. This would prevent people from finding page 2 and further in the search results. The idea was that the search engine would still follow all these links, so all the linked pages would still be properly indexed.
The problem is that Google said: long-term noindex on a page will lead to them not following links on
that page. This makes adding noindex to page 2 and further of paginated archives a bad idea, as it might lead to articles no longer getting the internal links they need.

Because of what Google said about long-term noindex, sub-pages of archives should not have indexed. So you can no longer keep page 2 and further out of the search results. This has the annoying side effect that Google Search Console and analysis may give you warnings (as seen currently by myself). Specifically, it might warn you about duplicate titles and duplicate meta descriptions. Google have confirmed that these warnings for paginated archive URL's can safely be ignored.

I hope this will help anyone else who might have a question like this for this topic around paginating archives creating duplicate metas and pages.