Should I be filling Meta descriptions out?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Mike Cooke: Hi a quick question regarding wordpress, I have run a report through moz and on the ;Pages with Missing Meta Description Tag it has brought back a few pages but all are categories pages and /page/5/ etc pages I normally don't bother filling the meta data for the categories. My question is should I be filling these out and how best to describe an actual category, does anyone have a good example of this? as for page/5 Im not sure how to address this.
• 
  Dave Elliott: I tend to go with 'Read the latest (general blog theme) (articles/posts/news) about (category) from (company/blog name/person)'
  
  simple and you get the brand name and your category should be a keyword you care about anyway, so does the job without requiring much thought.
• 
  Mike Cooke: +Dave Elliott ;cheers thats really helpful I am using yoast what do you use in the ;Canonical: or do you just leave it?
• 
  Dave Elliott: I'll let someone else answer that as i'm not overly familiar with wordpress or yoast(but am starting blogging soon, so will learn!), I thought yoast handled that automatically though....
• 
  Mike Cooke: quite a lot is handled by yoast and it is a great plugin, it just leaves the field available in the plugin. Reading up on it now..
• 
  Incredo: Typically meta descriptions for category pages and descriptions for tags for posts are missed by most of the bloggers. If from your Yoast options you have set that your category pages to appear on search engines as well then you can spend some 5-10 minutes to update their descriptions as well. You can do it by gong to your ''posts'' section on Wordpress. Otherwise if your tags and category pages are not crawled by Google you don't need to be concerned about meta descriptions
• 
  Perambur Kumar: Meta Description for Category is best practice and also you can include tags. Both play well in search engine rankings especially when it comes to Google. You can't add for page numbers.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:32:56 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/should_i_be_filling_meta_descriptions_out +Mike Cooke
  
  The cuetimes listed on this page are functional while the live broadcast continues and also once Youtube has finished processing the public broadcast. Processing time varies between 6-24 hours. During this period the clip is viewable in full but the cuetimes cannot be relied on. ;
  
  If our assistance with this issue was useful to you, please consider sharing your success story so that others might benefit.
• 
  Mike Cooke: thanks for the look at the problem, in the video the report it was mentioned what the main url was which is phc-lawdotcom and the report was generated from moz crawl errors.
  
  The report seems to show the duplicate issues from if a post is shown in more than one category I am getting duplicate content and the long url. ;