Nice article and I agree with all of it. However, just thought I’d share my solution – using the following method I’ve always got all my subsequent pages indexed.

I actually wrote a small article about the issue on my blog at http://www.web-design-talk.co.uk/164/prevent-duplicate-content-using-the-canonical-url-tag/ .

Firstly, I don’t use JavaScript paging at all, I kepp it all on the server side to kepp page load times low.

Basically, I try to keep all the pages unique. So for each page I’ll append ‘Page xx’ in title tag and meta desctiption. I’d also, append a ‘page xx’ to the header tag, so I’d end up with ‘Tshirts – Page 2′ in my h1 tag for category page.

I also make use of the canonical tag, I’m aware this isn’t a direct instruction to search engines, simply a ’strong hint’ as Matt Cutts puts it, but it still doesn’t hurt.

As you’e pointed out cat.php?p=1 and cat.php can cause duplicate content issues. In each page, before I append the ‘page xx’ text to the title, meta and h1 tags I include a check for page 1. If the current page is 1 I’ll simply exclude an additional text and set the canonical url to /cat.php.

I also use seo friendly urls for the page titles too E.g. site.com/tshirts/page/2 as opposed to cat.php?page=2

I’ve personally never had any problems with this approach.

Thanks! I’ll be checking your blog more often for ideas to improve our product.