100's of versions of the same page. Is rel=canonical the solution???

[RossFruin]

Hi,

I am currently working with an eCommerce site that has a goofy set up for their contact form.

Basically, their are hundreds of "contact us" pages that look exactly the same but have different URLs and are used to help the store owner determine which product the user contacted them about. So almost every product has it's own "contact us" URL.

The obvious solution is to do away with this set up but if that is not an option, would a rel=canonical tag linked back to the actually "contact us" page be a possible solution? Or is the canonical tag only used to show the difference between www vs non-www?

Thanks!

[StreamlineMetrics]

Yup, use the canonical tag to tell the search engines which URL should be designated as the "correct" page to index. Here is some more information from Google - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

[mememax]

I understand that you got some parameters in the url since you need them to recognize the product.

Just put a canonical to the generic contact us page and you're done.

Be sure that those parameters will be not carried over in other pages. In that sennse you'll better set up a self referring canonical on all pages so you'll avoid any dupe issue in the future.