Those methods may not be perfect but they are efficient..
Duplicate content and meta tags are a huge problems to website owners..
One has to figure out an efficient way of solving this..
And about the post, its a really informative and impressive article..

below is a blog post from google that explains this

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

I use method #1 too, and think pagination is a good thing.

One doesn’t have to use the tiny 1,2,3 system (which is a pain indeed), rather use text anchor which will suit both usability and SEO (ie: “Next blue widgets”).

I find myself discouraged when confronted to 10’s or 100’s of results. Moreover, I think there are lots of ways (user vote for instance) to sort your items so the more relevant are grouped on the first page.

Regards,

I have successfully used method #1 for some time. Initially, I was worried that pages would take too long to load if there was too many products. However, I found through a/b testing that visitors were willing to wait. In fact, I’ve successfully used this method on product category pages with over 100 products.

More and more I’m finding that this method is preferable not just from an SEO view, but for website usability. Paging irritates people, as they have to navigate those tiny 1,2,3… links and they sometimes miss them all together.

For people who expect their users to use a major engine for site search, this is a major duplicate content problem. You absolutely need unique titles and meta descriptions for effective third-party site search.