Canonical Tag for Ecommerce Site

[DynoSaur]

My client has an ecommerce site with over 1,000 products. We have a ton of duplicates because of how their ecommerce system handles product pages.

Each time a new product is added, there is a default product page created (/product/12345-product-name.aspx).

Each time that product is added to a specific product category, another, separate URL is created (/product/office-chairs/12345-product-name.aspx).

The site has over 1,000 duplicates (at least one for each product) because of how the ecommerce system structures URLs. We are unable to have unique content on /products/12345-product-name.aspx and /product/office-chairs/12345-product-name.aspx because both pages pull from the same database.

Their webteam informed me that they can't implement canonical tags on individual pages, they must be dynamically added to the site all at once. Thus forcing me to choose all of the default product pages as primary URLs.

Both types of URLs are getting indexed and the product URLs that were added to the categories are SEO friendly so I'm leary to eliminate one or the other with a canonical tag or a no index.

Suggestions?

[areygie]

What is the e-commerce solution your client is using?

[DynoSaur]

It is a custom built ecommerce site in asp.net.