User experience regarding dulpicate content and managing this content with google.

[LadyApollo]

Hi long title i know!

We are moving on to magento and have chosen to allocate a specific colour to each category using corresponding tabbed navigation for user experience.All products within each of the coloured tabs then inherit the repective colour, giving the products a category identiy within the store. This layout has had a positive feedback from our "testers"

As a lot of our products are seasonal and can be represented in different categories there is a significant amount of duplicate content.

ATM i see our options as being:

1. Alter the site structure so that the category is not shown in the url, therefore eliminating our duplicate products. The downside of this is that the colour co-ordination of the categories would not work at product level as its the category path that assigns the colour.
2. create canonical links for every duplicate, can this be damaging?
3. keep the duplicates and do nothing let google decide the most important version of a product.

any guidance would be appreciated!

[SEMPassion]

Eliminate option 3.

Either of your first two options should work.  You should be able to re-write your URL's and eliminate the category but still use the category variable to alter your color scheme.

[LadyApollo]

There was a problems with Q&A over the weekend and this question seems to have posted several times!