Best way to consolidate link juice

[James77]

I've got a conundrum I would appreciate your thoughts on.

I have a main container page listing a group of products, linking out to individual product pages.

The problem I have is the all the product pages target exactly the same keywords as the main product page listing all the products.

Initially all my product pages were ranking much higher then the container page, as there was little individual text on the container page, and it was being hit with a duplicate content penality I believe.

To get round this, on the container page, I have incorporated a chunk of text from each product listed on the page.

However, that now means "most" of the content on an individual product page is also now on the container page - therefore I am worried that i will get a duplicate content penality on the product pages, as the same content (or most of it) is on the container page.

Effectively I want to consolidate the link juice of the product pages back to the container page, but i am not sure how best to do this.

Would it be wise to rel=canonical all the product pages back to the container page? Rel=nofollow all the links to the product pages? - or possibly some other method?

Thanks

[NerdsOnCall]

Ok, it sounds like there is more going on here then just seo. You have to consider your brand, what's best for your customers, and the over all branding of your website.

However, this is an seo question so I will give an seo answer. If I were you, I would target the product pages. In a page you have much more "on page optimization" options. You can use: Tile Tags, proper Urls, H1 tags.... you get the point.  If you try to use one page to taget to many products, you are going to dilute your on page optimization.

If your home page has more authority, use it to target more competitive keywords, and maybe just one or two products... and then you can  link to your other products.