Should paginated content have unique meta tags?

Question

I have a category page that leads to an additional 100 pages. For example:

www.example.com/category <- this is my category page

www.example.com/category-2.html <- this is paginated content

My question is, do I need unique meta tags for each and every page, or is there any way that my category page's meta tags can be used by all the numbered pages?

Answer 1

For my paginated results, what I did was dynamically add page numbers and a result index. For example:

<meta name="description" content="Page 3 of 11, nike shoes 30 to 40 out of 300. 
Buy good quality nike shoes blah blah">

In the above example, page 3 of 11 and pages 30 to 40 out of 300 would dynamically be generated using PHP or similar. This is OK I believe.

If you don't want to use new meta descriptions for each page, then use:

rel="next"

and

rel="prev"

Here's a couple of resources worth looking at:

Google's Guidelines on Paginated Content

The MOZ Blog - Pagination: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience