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--> 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!

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.