How To Change Descriptions On Category Page 2 / 3 etc

[DaleZon]

I have a quick question that I hope someone might be able to help me with.

On a wordpress website I have a lot of posts in each category.

My problem is there are now several category pages. ie:

https://www.mywebsite.com/category/cat-name/

https://www.mywebsite.com/category/cat-name/page2

https://www.mywebsite.com/category/cat-name/page3

The problem is on the category page I can set page title / description etc. But the problem is I cant do that on page2 / page 3 etc.

Does anyone know how I can change the titles and decriptions etc on those pages.

Thanks

[MikeTek]

Hi Dale,

Nigel is right here - it's best practice to leave the Titles/Descriptions on these archive pages as-is and follow Google's guidelines (use next/prev link tags) to indicate paginated content.

If your concern is duplicate content, next/prev tags give Google a clear signal of the relationship between these pages.

Best,
Mike

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Dale

It is not necessary to change the Meta for these pages as you will find that they will form part of a rel/prev pagination sequence for Google which starts at the non-paginated version.

Google wants you to leave these as they are in a sequence. Check out here: https://yoast.com/pagination-seo-best-practices/

I hope that helps

Regards Nigel

[GastonRiera]

Hi Dale,

Do you rank with those pages?
Normally archive pages are not a subject of optimization due to the poor hability to rank against the first page or other pages.

Remember that Meta Descriptions are only visible for Search Engines and they pick that description if and only if meets the searcher intent.

In the case that you dont know what to do with category pages and want to gain some "SEO juice".. YOAST has made a great article about it: Using category and tag pages for SEO - YOAST

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR