Duplicate Content For E-commerce

[pinksgreens]

On our E-commerce site, we have multiple stores. Products are shown on our multiple stores which has created a duplicate content problem. Basically if we list a product say a shoe,that listing will show up on our multiple stores I assumed the solution would be to redirect the pages, use non follow tags or to use  the rel=canonical tag. Are there any other options for me to use. I think my best bet is to use a mixture of 301 redirects and canonical tags. What do you recommend. I have 5000+ pages of duplicate content so the problem is big.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[danatanseo]

Without going into the "why" of the multiple stores, I would say, yes rel=canonical to one version of the page and not on the other pages. However, this can take Google quite a while to recognize all of the rel=canonicals across a large site.

I can't see how 301-redirects would be helpful unless you are talking about removing the multiple stores and using 301s to redirect the removed URLs to relevant existing URLs on the remaining store. (Personally, again, without getting into the "why" of multiple stores...I would get rid of the multiple stores if they don't offer anything unique and 301 everything to one store).

I wouldn't use "nofollow" for any of the pages in this situation. I'm interested to know what others think on this.

[Francisco_Meza]

What CMS are you using? This sounds like Magento. If so, go to your system > config and make your default site rel=canonical all the pages to the main product listing. Also drill down into all the stores and do the same thing (again if this is Magento).

[pinksgreens]

Yes I am using Magento. I did exactly what you said but I think magento set it up wrong. Please see my other question that I just made listing what went wrong.