Question on URL when paging back to page 1 of a website content

[bwnbwn]

How would you best handle this paging issue I have found on a website I am working on.
Let's say you read through an article and in the bottom of this is the paging to access more articles so I select 2, then 3. I then want to back to 1. This is were I find the issue.
When I go back to one the url is not the same so I have 2 urls with the same content.
Even in WebmasterWorld paging if you go to the bottom select and go back to one you will see there are 2 urls with the same content.
Example:
I select the SEO area in Google
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/ [webmasterworld.com]
go to page 2
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/page1.htm [webmasterworld.com]
and return to page 1 or the original page I started at
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/page0.htm [webmasterworld.com]
Same content different urls, I have 1-100 in paging articles I now have 100 urls pointing at a duplicate url. I have the original page in the navigation so I have 1000's of links pointing at the URL I want to be displayed.

Is there a solution especially if the 1st landing page doesn't change on a daily basis?

I want the paging to be indexed so adding a nofollow isn't a good option, but maybe my only option.
I am open for suggestions.

[edited by: phranque at 11:02 pm (utc) on Jan 2, 2014]
[edit reason] displayed full urls for clarity [/edit]

[aakk9999]

I would not "nofollow" it.

I normally resolve this issue by asking developers to drop the "page 1" parameter (or what in WebmasterWorld case would be 'page0.htm' part of URL) from the the first page of pagination whenever creating internal URL to page 1 on the site.

I then also ask for a redirect to be set up from URL with "page 1" param/part of URL to URL without "page 1"

The alternatives are:

- to use canonical link element and specify URL without "page 1" param/part of URL as a canonical one (probably the best and the easiest alternative)
- to always use "page 1" parameter/part of url and the URL of paginated article without "page1" gives either 404 or redirects to page1 URL (not an elegant solution)
- to live with duplicate content and let Google sort it out (I would not recommend this)

Also a note: if you use rel next/previous, then rel previous should point to whatever you decide is a correct (canonical) URL for the first page of pagination.

[bwnbwn]

Thanks aakk999 I will look at the suggestions you posted.

[JD_Toims]

- Change the code creating the link so it links to the main version of the first page URL and also redirect the /page-num.ext version to that location.

* Using a canonical would be my second choice if for some reason the preceding was not possible, but generally, if you can set a canonical, you can link to and redirect to that same URL either via .htaccess or server-side scripting lang.

[bwnbwn]

Thanks guys....From your suggestions I think I have a solution but will have to confirm this with the programmer next week. The website is a Joomla CMS and I am not yet familiar with the code.

[phranque]

creating the redirect should be fairly simple.
the difficult task for you is solving the canonical internal link problem.
in your case you will probably have to fix a joomla module that is generating those pagination urls.