I have an ecommerce site with paginated product categories.I would like to add a description for each category to improve the thin content problem ecommerce pages generally have.I would like this paragraph description to show on each page of its respective category, but how do I avoid the duplicate content issue.First thing that comes to mind is rel=canonical to point back to the first page, but according to Yoast, that's not such a good idea:A common misconception is that the canonical on a paginated page  should always point to page 1 in the series. This is  not the case.  When you do that, you run the risk of search engines not indexing  links that appear on page 2, 3 etc. of your archives. This would cause  older articles to drop out of the search results entirely.To me, this makes perfect sense.  The products are different on each page.What suggestions do you have for the best way to handle this?
Handling Duplicate Content & Pagination with Category Description
seo;ecommerce;canonical url;categories;thin content
Pagination  is not duplicate content...Google will and does index pagination pages regardless of the uniqueness of the page. Also, it is massively common for webmasters to not understand exactly what duplicate content is. Understanding what duplicate content is...Duplicate content is where the exact page appears elsewhere external or internally, product pagination pages, blog pagination and so forth are not duplicate because the snippets in combination with other snippets makes the page unique... page 2/3 is duplicate of page 2/3, but it is not duplicate of 1/3, or the actual product or article URL.Canonical is not needed on such pagesUsing canonical links tells Google where the main source URL can be found, it makes little to no difference if you use, or don't use canonical links on your pagination pages, in fact the entire Stack Exchange network with millions of tag paginations does not use canonical at all (on this pages), and they have no indexing problems at all. Page Content DescriptionsHaving some type of page description is preferable if it adds to the user experience, but it's not required to rank those type of pages. Stack Exchange on tag pages users a description provided by the tag description, this is often repeated again, and again over 10's of pages, again... no indexing problems, some pages may not even have a description because one has not been provided by the community. If you do believe that it adds user value to the page then by all means add a description, and if you wanted to extend further onto that and have unique headers with page numbers, and slightly different descriptions for each categories then by using WordPress codex you can do so. On my WordPress site and on my category pages for example, I change the a few words depending what category is being displayed You are viewing: <?php single_cat_title(); ?>. I even add different titles, and meta descriptions, and use suffix (page 1 of n). I even went to the extent of adding different welcome messages to each category depending what time of day it was, totally overkill... but nice touch at the time I thought, but all this isn't required. Here's a look at the code I use if you wanted to adapt, or get ideas from:<?php/* This sets the $time variable to the current hour in the 24 hour clock format */$time = date(H);/* Set the $timezone variable to become the current timezone */$timezone = date(e);/* If the time is less than 1200 hours, show good morning */if ($time < 12) {    echo Good morning,;} else/* If the time is grater than or equal to 1200 hours, but less than 1700 hours, so good afternoon */if ($time >= 12 && $time < 17) {    echo Good afternoon,;} else/* Should the time be between or equal to 1700 and 1900 hours, show good evening */if ($time >= 17 && $time < 19) {    echo Good evening,;} else/* Finally, show good night if the time is greater than or equal to 1900 hours */if ($time >= 19) {    echo Hey Night Owl,;}?> You're viewing all our articles within the following categories <?php single_cat_title(); ?>. The BYBE blog has many more categories that you will help you find useful and relevant articles, here is our major categories: <?php $categories = get_tags( array('orderby' => 'name', 'parent'  => 0) ); foreach ( $categories as $category ) { printf( '<a title=View all articles tagged with %2$s href=%1$s>%2$s</a> ', esc_url( get_category_link( $category->term_id ) ), esc_html( $category->name ));} ?>. If you have any questions, concerns or complaints regarding any of our online articles, then please don't hesitate to <a href=/contact-us title=Contact the BYBE team in Bournemouth>get in touch</a>. Alternatively you can reach us on <a href=https://twitter.com/bybe_net title=Reach us on Twitter>Twitter</a>, <a href=https://plus.google.com/+ByBeBournemouth title=Talk to BYBE on Google Plus>Google Plus</a>, or <a href=https://www.facebook.com/ByBeUK title=Reach our team on Facebook>Facebook</a>.</p>Titles and Meta DescriptionsGoogle does prefer to see unique meta descriptions and titles, thankfully this is an easy task when using YoastSEO thanks to the supported variable's, if you take a look at my site you can see that each propagation page displays a different page number after 1, suppressing those nagging warnings in Webmaster Tools (Console). 