Pagination and matching title tags - does it matter when using rel="prev" and "next" attributes?

[McTaggart]

I'm looking at a site with the rel="prev" and "next" HTML attributes in place, to deal with pagination.

However, the pages in each paginated category have identical page titles - is this an issue?

Rand gives an example of how he'd vary page titles here, to prevent problems, though I'm not entirely sure whether this advice applies to sites with the rel="prev" and "next" HTML attributes in place: https://moz.com/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience 

Any advice would be welcome - many thanks, Luke

[McTaggart]

Many thanks again CleverPhD, and thanks for your input Martijn - much appreciated. I guess one issue may be the mass alteration of title tags acting as a spam flag, as I have hundreds of pages to deal with - most of the website :-I - I am advising that the changes are implemented gradually so we don't upset Google - is my caution justified?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I second this, we just implemented a similar thing to make sure that we don't get in trouble with duplicate titles.

[CleverPhD]

Yes this is an issue.  All pages in pagination using rel next prev need unique titles (just like all pages on your site need unique titles).  I usually accomplish this with each title being something like

Website Name Article Archives - Page $

or

Shoe Inventory - Page $

Where $ is whatever page of the pagination the person is on.

If you do have duplicate titles due to pagination (or otherwise), then you will start to see this show up as errors in your Search Console reports.