Canonical URL in blog post category post listing?

Question

I have a set of categories that each list their own blog posts. I am afraid there might be a problem with duplicate content as the posts move down the pages. Should these subpages include a canonical link back to the main listing page for this tag?

For example:

example.com/category/5/

would have a canonical URL to:

example.com/category/

Is this considered good or bad practice for SEO?

Answer 1

You should not use the canonical this way, paginated listing are well understood by Google. You can help him to make it clear : http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.fr/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html