How to handle pagination for a large website?

[J-Banz]

I am currently doing a site audit on a large website that just went through a redesign. When looking through their webmaster tools, they have about 3,000 duplicate Title Tags. This is due to the way their pagination is set up on their site.

For example. domain.com/books-in-english?page=1 // domain.com/books-in-english?page=4

What is the best way to handle these? According to Google Webmaster Tools, a viable solution is to do nothing because Google is good at distinguishing these. That said, it seems like their could be a better solution to help prevent duplicate content issues.

Any advice would be much welcomed.

[Nishadha]

If you're using the WordPress SEO by Yoast you can easily do this by adding %%page%% to your title template. It appears as "Page 2 of 5".

[J-Banz]

Thanks Alex!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I agree with Alex on this, try adding the pagination to the title element. This will also make it a bit more usable for your users to know they're on the second page if they don't have the option to look at the URL.

[Alex-Harford]

This isn't usually a big problem, especially if you use rel="next" and rel="prev".

If you wanted to remove the duplicate content warning in Webmaster Tools you could add the page number at the start of each title tag from page 2 onwards. I like having the page number in the title tag as a signal to website visitors.