What do you mean by category listings? I'm talking about category pages where each item in the category is listed.

I do link from product or item pages to each other using next, previous and related items.

Also I'm pretty sure about this but just asking, rel=canonical for page 2,3 should be that page and not page 1 ?

Thanks for the answer.

Does a link from a page with noindex,follow count as an internal link? Will the items on page 2 receive any link juice, if their only internal link is from a noindexed page?

What do you think?

Is it better to use the robots meta noindex, follow tag for paging, (page 2, page 3) of Category Pages which lists items within each category

or just let Google index these pages

Before Panda I was not using noindex because I figured if page 2 is in Google's index then the items on page 2 are more likely to be in Google's index. Also then each item has an internal link

So after I got hit by panda, I'm thinking well page 2 has no unique content only a list of links with a short excerpt from each item which can be found on each items page so it's not unique content, maybe that contributed to Panda penalty. So I place the meta tag noindex, follow on every page 2,3 for each category page. Page 1 of each category page has a short introduction so i hope that it is enough to make it "thick" content (is that a word :-))  My visitors don't want long introductions, it hurts bounce rate and time on site.

Now I'm wondering if that is common practice and if items on page 2 are less likely to be indexed since they have no internal links from an indexed page

Thanks!

if you don't want search engines to see the links, for example if you are concerned about too many links on the page,  then put the links in a JavaScript file and block it with robots.txt

Search engines can crawl regular javascript, whether they do or not, and how this will impact your site is not known.