Canonical tags on paginated pages... are both of these tags required?

[morpheus83]

Canonical tags can be a bit tricky for paginated pages. Can I use both these tags on the same page -
1) The normal canonical tag - <link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page/2/"/>
2) The next and prev links - <link rel="prev" href="http://example.com/"/> <link rel="next" href="http://example.com/page/3/"/>

[tedster]

As far as I know, yes. Next and previous links are also used by some browsers, where the canonical link is specifically for search engines.

[Robert Charlton]

In your navigation, in addition to next and previous links, it's common to provide a "View All" option.

The canonical link is most likely to be used in conjunction with the View All option, where you want all of the pages, viewed as one, to be your preferred (canonical) version.

The example you provide above, where the canonical is specified as "page/2/", strikes me as kind of unusual. I'd think that you'd want to use the canonical link to specify either page/1/ or to specify your "view all" page.

PS: Ah... I'm now getting another possible thrust of your question. Yes, I suppose you could also use an appropriate self-referencing canonical on each component page, essentially independent of pagination... but it would conflict if you preferred the 'view all' page to be the guide for Google to weight its indexing. For the view all preference, you'd want to use the canonical link referencing the 'view all' page on each of the paginated pages.