What you’re saying is that there is no canonical possible in this case. The better solution, if that’s true, is to not render it at all.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html
Mistake 1: rel=canonical to the first page of a paginated series
Imagine that you have an article that spans several pages:
- example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=1
- example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=2
- and so on
Specifying a rel=canonical from page 2 (or any later page) to page 1 is not correct use of rel=canonical, as these are not duplicate pages. Using rel=canonical in this instance would result in the content on pages 2 and beyond not being indexed at all.
So your advice was incorrect. The correct thing to do, per Google webmaster guidelines, is not to render canonical at all on paginated content.
@techapj can you make sure that’s the case in every common scenario? It is definitely the case on /latest (homepage).