Video thumbnail pages with "sort" feature -- tons of duplicate content?

[540SEO]

A client has 2 separate pages for video thumbnails. One page is "popular videos" with a sort function for over 700 pages of video thumbnails with 10 thumbnails and short desriptions per page. (/videos?sort_by=popularity).

The second page is "latest videos" (/videos?sort_by=latest) with over 7,000 pages.

Both pages have a sort function -- including latest, relevance, popularity, time uploaded, etc. Many of the same video thumbnails appear on both pages.

Also, when you click a thumbnail you get a full video page and these pages appear to get indexed well.

There seem to be duplicate content issues between the "popular" and "latest" pages, as well as within the sort results on each of those pages. (A unique URL is generated everytime you use the sort function i.e. /videos?sort_by=latest&uploaded=this_week).

Before my head explodes, what is the best way to treat this? I was thinking a noindex,follow meta robot on every page of thumbnails since the individual video pages are well indexed, but that seems extreme. Thoughts?

[Alex-Harford]

I don't have time to write out an answer but here's a useful link: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience

Google have recently introduced support of rel="next" and rel="prev" too: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

[540SEO]

Thanks for the link. That does help with the paginated pages issue.

Anyone have any thoughts on the sort feature and how that will be viewed by the search engines? Are different "sort" results containing some of the same video thumbs/descriptions considered duplicate content? What's the best way to handle that?

[MichaelC-15022]

Hi Keith,

You need to choose 1 "master" sort order, use the pagination techniques outlined in the link Alex posted, and rel=canonical all of the other sort orders to the main page of your "master" sort order.

Michael.