Can we have Google crawl but ignore our paginated category pages and prefer our individual post pages in the index?

Question

We have a site with a massive content back-end (50.000+) with, lets say, posts. We want to make these posts available to users, so people searching for the content on Google will find one of these posts. A win for our organic traffic I'd say ..

Google is crawling all this content since a week or two but we see that, when searching for a specific post-title, the category pages get pushed instead of detail page. That should be no problem, however, the category page that is shown where title X appeared on is ?page=45. But, since crawling, this post doesn't appear on page 45 but now on page 46. Quite confusing for the visitor of course.

How should we tackle this? The posts are loaded chronological, and new posts (200+) are added each day.

Taking a step back, can we make sure that Google sees our category-paginated-pages but ignores them and favour the detail page when showing results? I see that a user here advices to no-index the category / archive pages..

Answer 1

Yes the correct fix here is to set the category pages to noindex in the robots meta tag.

However you might want to keep the first page of any category open for indexing, so this can become a landing page specific to the category topic, where as the posts within it may be quite broad.

Then implement the rel=next/prev tags on your category paginated pages, so any SEO value from the paginated pages can be attributed to the main category page.