The Mysterious Case of Pagination, Canonical Tags

[sidstar]

Hey guys,

My head explodes when I think of this problem. So I will leave it to you guys to find a solution...

My root domain (xxx.com) runs on WordPress platform.

I use Yoast SEO plugin.

The next page of root domain -- page/2/ -- has been canonicalized to the same page -- page/2/ points to page/2/ for example.

The page/2/ and remaining pages also have this rel tags:

I have also added "noindex,follow" to page/2/ and further -- Yoast does this automatically.

Note: Yoast plugin also adds canonical to page/2/...page/3/ automatically.

Same is the case with category pages and tag pages. Oh, and the author pages too -- they all have self-canonicalization, rel prev & rel next tags, and have been "noindex, followed."

Problem:

Am I doing this the way it should be done?

I asked a Google Webmaster employee on rel next and prev tags, and this is what she said: "We do not recommend noindexing later pages, nor rel="canonical"izing everything to the first page." (My bad, last year I was canonicalizing pages to first page).

One of the popular blog, a competitor, uses none of these tags. Yet they rank higher. Others following this format have been hit with every kind of Google algorithm I could think of. I want to leave it to Google to decide what's better, but then again, Yoast SEO plugin rules my blog -- okay, let's say I am a bad coder.

Any help, suggestions, and thoughts are highly appreciated.

Update 1: Paginated pages -- including category pages and tag pages -- have unique snippets; no full-length posts. Thought I'd make that clear.

[evolvingSEO]

Hey There

Assuming your WordPress theme isn't conflicting with any of this, so long as you select "noindex subpages of archives" in Yoast you should be good to go. No need playing around with anything else.

-Dan

[sidstar]

--> I think it's important to look at your site as a whole and divide the number of all pages by paginated pages.

I barely have control over these paginated pages. WordPress automatically takes care of this. I do, however, have the power to add a fixed number of links per paginated page. For example, I can set "10" in WordPress panel and every paginated page -- homepage, page/2/ for example -- will have 10 links (10 articles).

Subsequent pages will be automatically created as I feed my blog with more content.

Thanks Irving!

[irvingw]

The noindex,follow tag on paginated pages will not compromise your sites integrity with Google. I think it's important to look at your site as a whole and divide the number of all pages by paginated pages.  If the ratio is above 10%, I would be concerned that the site may appear to be more of a directory and it definitely would make sense to noindex the site. Also, there are paginated pages with just a bunch of links and other paginated pages with a lot more data surrounding the links. The fact that others are ranking higher probably have more to do with overall site content and PR.