Is there a way to stop my product pages with the "show all" catagory/attribute from duplicating content?

[cscoville]

If there were less pages with the "show all" attribute it would be a simple fix by adding the canonical URL tag. But seeing that there are about 1,000 of them I was wondering if their was a broader fix that I could apply.

[altecdesign]

Check this out

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

[dogmatic69]

What I have done on my sites that seems to work well is use meta "noindex follow"  if its not on the first/main page.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Curtis,

If I understand what you are saying, you have 1000 "showall" pages - is that correct? And some of these show all pages are duplicates of another?

I suspect you are not talking about classical pagination problems, the kind that Adam Audette addresses here. Instead, you are talking about an entirely different case altogether where your showall pages duplicate themselves. In this scenario, you have a product page that list a certain number of items, and a link that says "show all"  When you hit "show all" it shows the exact same items, but the URL has changed. Is this correct?

1. The best way to do this would be to automate it, so that a canonical tag was automatically added in each of these cases. If your CMS doesn't allow this, you might find a developer who can build it in for you.

2. If it's truly a matter of parameters, you can adjust the parameter settings in Google Webmaster Tools so that they ignore the "showall" parameter

3. As a last resort, if a technical fix is beyond your capacity, you could place a "nofollow" on the link to the showall pages, and block robots from crawling those pages by using a robots.txt file. Eventually Google would drop those pages from the index. This isn't an ideal solution, as it would take several months, but it might help long term.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[cscoville]

Cyrus, that is exactly what I was saying. Thanks so much for the help you really did save me the trouble of trail and error on this one. I also appreciate the help from altecdesign and dogmatic69.