AnonyMouse - 11:04 am on Jul 11, 2008 (gmt 0)

One site I am working on has many paginated result sets. They show up with the same titles/meta tags, and have broadly the same semantic content. The first page is linked using the target keywords, the rest use "page 2" etc.

I had always assumed that when it comes to Google, the more pages the better. Rationale being:
- more pages = more PageRank generated
- more internal backlnks to first page with KW in link text
- Google likes bigger sites

Now I'm not so sure...WMT tells me that we have many pages with duplicate titles/metas, and rankings have been suffering for awhile :-(

Pagination is needed due to the size of the results sets. Also, I get long-tail searches thanks to some of the content on paginated pages.

So...what's the best strategy here? Options I've considered so far:
- Somehow make metas distinct (add "page 2" into each meta? add something unique to generated content?)
- "no index, follow" the pages - this wd prevent duplicate metas as well as keep the PR going, but I'd lose the long-tail searches.

Any thoughts on the best option to pursue when you have paginated results to display?