Pagination - How to deal with title and description?

[castor_t]

I have several categories that are spanned into multiple pages.

The title and description for the original page are unique. But for the remaining pages, I am appending "Page xx" in both title and description. The problem is that since there is not much difference in the Title and Description from that of Page 1, Google seems to be ignoring those pages from appearing in the Index.

I read some articles on the web that says "Use the content from the top content of the page" in title and description. But I can see a problem with that. If the second page contains the title "ABC" and description "DESC", it won't be there forever. I mean as content gets added, pages increase, and the title and description keeps on changing (which isn't good). Google will have to index the pages again and again (with every content change). That might also create content duplication issue (Page 2 and Page 3, might have same title and description, if Page 2 is not indexed and Page 3 has).

Is there a way to deal with this issue? I don't and can't edit these pages manually to put a unique title and desc.
What I was thinking is to read the content (dynamically) and use the word which gets repeated a lot in that page, and use that in the title and description. So that it won't change much. I read somewhere on this forum, to use noindex, nofollow for the rest of the pages. Well, I believe, If I do so, I might lose backlinks and pagerank. Also, because of this pagination, I have Google Sitelinks (the links that appear below in SERPS), that have just Page 2, Page 3, Page 4 etc.

Do you have any solutions on how to deal with this?

[tedster]

How about programming the title as "[category name] from [first item on page] to [last item on page]?

[castor_t]

What is currently have is not much different than what you've suggested. This is how the title is currently programmed as. "Title - Page {No}". Eg: Title, Title - Page 2, Title - Page 3 etc.

Since most part of the title is duplicated across multiple pages, Goog seems to be ignoring them to display in search results. When I do a "site:" search, I could still see the rest of the pages, but not when I do a search for a keyword.

[castor_t]

How about this idea? Having fixed content for a Page.

For the sake of discussion, let's say I display only 10 rows in a page and the content will be displayed in the descending order of date.
The first page will always be dynamic, which means it changes when I add new entries. But when I have 20 rows, I would specify the older 10 rows to a fixed page, say Page 2, and that never changes. So, when I have 20 rows, the first page will have 10 rows (latest), and the second page (Page 2) will have the last 10 rows. When I added a new row, I have 21 rows in total. The first page displays the 10 new rows, Page 3 will have one row and will be displayed second, Page 2 will have the last 10 rows.

Page 1 ... Page 3 ... Page 2.

Now If I have 45 rows.
Page 1 ... Page 5 ... Page 4 ... Page 3 ... Page 2
Page 1 will have the 10 latest rows. (1-10)
Page 5 will have 5 rows. (11-15)
Page 4, Page 3 and Page 2 will have 10 rows each and will never change. (15-25, 25-35, 35-45 respectively)

And for these fixed pages (Page 4, Page 3 and Page 2), I will take the unique word in that page and try to build up a title and description dynamically. This will never change as more content gets added to the site as these are fixed.

The rows will be in the descending order of date submitted. The only problem is the number of rows in Page 2 will change, depending on the total number of rows.

I hope I make sense, but If you don't understand any part of this, let me know and I will try to elaborate it.

[tedster]

I like it - keeping the pages stable is definitely part of the pagination battle.

The other part is driving enough PR to the deeper pages; in other words, the link structure. Some sites just make sure there are a couple different click paths to get to their individual product pages and then don't worry about getting the category pages indexed at all.

[castor_t]

I implemented the change. The URLs in pagination will be in descending order, the page numbers in the pagination will be in ascending though.

/folder/ => /folder/page23.htm => /folder/page22.htm => ... /folder/page2.htm

I am creating a unique title, description and keywords for each of the paginated pages. And those pages which I haven't updated, will have "page xx" appended to the title and description.

Not much of a difference to the end user, but hope Goog likes it.

[neildt]

Why not use the canonical link for each page ? Works for me.

[castor_t]

I want to get all the paginated pages indexed.