Duplicate Content Issue within the Categories Area

[Ben-HPB]

We are in the process of building out a new website, it has been built in Drupal.

Within the scan report from SEOMOZ Crawl Diagnostics and it look like I have a duplicate content issue.

Example:

We sell Vinyl Banners so we have many different templates one can use from within our Online Banner Builder Tool.

We have broken them down via categories:

Issue: Duplicate Page Content

/categories/activities  has 9 other URLS associated this issue, I have many others but this one will work for an example.

Within this category we have multiple templates attached to this page.

Each of the templates do not need their own page however we use this to pull the templates into one page onto the activities landing page.

I am wondering if I need to nofollow, noindex each of those individule templates and just get the main top level category name indexed.

Or is there a better way to do this to minimize the impact of Panda?

[eyepaq]

I would use rel canonical to make sure you tag the main url and set on the rest of the pages a rel canonical to the main page you've selected from the pool of the duplicate pages . This way those pages won't  compete with each other.

Duplicate content within your own website is not a Panda issue or a penalization issue - you are safe from this point of view but you loose a lot as you compete with yourself with several pages for the same keywords

Hope it helps.

[Dr-Pete]

When you say "templates", can you explain what you mean? Do all 9 variations have the same content, but with a different wrapper (graphical look and feel)? In that case, I agree with @eyepaq - the canonical tag would be your best bet. It's a bit tough to tell with a specific example, but the key issue is how different the pages are (and if they have search value).

I have to disagree, though, regarding internal duplicate content not being a Panda issue. I think thin and near-duplicate internal content is very much part of the Panda equation. I've also seen large-scale duplication cause massive ranking problems.