How should I manage duplicate content caused by a guided navigation for my e-commerce site?

[FireMountainGems]

I am working with a company which uses Endeca to power the guided navigation for our e-commerce site. I am concerned that the duplicate content generated by having the same products served under numerous refinement levels is damaging the sites ability to rank well, and was hoping the Moz community could help me understand how much of an impact this type of duplicate content could be having. I also would love to know if there are any best practices for how to manage this type of navigation. Should I nofollow all of the URLs which have more than 1 refinement used on a category, or should I allow the search engines to go deeper than that to preserve the long tail? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

[dotfly]

The only differentiation (if there is any) you can make when it comes up to DC is between partial and "normal" DC... keep in mind that any type (!!!) of DC won`t do your site any good! Avoid DC whenever and wherever you can! Under all circumstances... I do not know Endeca but dealing with DC caused by a navigational structure is a serious problem, especially within a shop system.

There are differnt ways to fight DC or to confine it... most common is rel=prev/next or rel=canonical... these are alternatives and never perfect solutions but there are lots of scenarios where this is a big help.

I would be careful with follow and nofollow... if you let the robot follow everything this might lead to lots of errors in the scenario you describe but on the other hand setting many URLs to nofollow can also harm your site because it`s not a very trustworthy signal for Google

[FireMountainGems]

You are absolutely right about nofollow overuse being a trust factor. I had not thought about that aspect of this issue, and thank you for bringing it up. In regards to using canonical and rel prev / next, I am not sure what an implementation of this would look like. I added in rel canonical pointing to the www version of the page URL without any unnecessary parameters, and I am familiar with the idea of having a "Show All" page so as to avoid pagination (we added in our pagination parameters into Google Webmaster Tools instead). Would you recommend using canonical to roll up results pages to a category and parent refinement level, and if so how many refinements would you recommend before drawing the line?

Thank you again,

David

[dotfly]

Hi David,

I would like to give you an article at hand:

http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/57204/what-is-a-best-canonical-url-for-a-search-result-page

Maybe you noticed it already? Its hard to give you a recommendation for the refinement levels... in general I would advise you to be very careful with that... to me it sounds not so bad what youve done so far...

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

My former agency has a good post on pagination that you might find useful: http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html

You definitely want to cut down on duplicate content as much as possible - let me know if that post does the trick for the ecommerce question!

Cheers

[FireMountainGems]

This was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much you have really helped me out.