Results Pages Duplication - What to do?

[dooberry]

Hi all,

I run a large, well established hotel site which fills a specific niche. Last February we went through a redesign which implemented pagination and lots of PHP / SQL wizzardy. This has left us, however, with a bit of a duplication problem which I'll try my best to explain!

Imagine Hotel 1 has a pool, as well as a hot tub. This means that Hotel 1 will be in the search results of both  'Hotels with Pools' and 'Hotels with Hot Tubs', with exactly the same copy, affiliate link and thumbnail picture in the search results.

Now imagine this issue occurring hundreds of times across the site and you have our problem, especially since this is a Panda-hit site.

We've tried to keep any duplicate content away from our landing pages with some success  but it's just all those pesky PHP paginated pages which doing us in (e.g. Hotels/Page-2/?classifications[]263=73491&classifcations[]742=24742 and so on)

I'm thinking that we should either a) completely noindex all of the PHP search results or b) move us over to a Javascript platform. Which would you guys recommend? Or is there another solution which I'm overlooking?

Any help most appreciated!

[WhoWuddaThunk]

If the searches are taking place right on your site, then I would follow,noindex the search pages.  That way the bots follow to the specific listings, but doesn't get gunked up by all the duplicate search entries.

[irvingw]

also add classifications  to the URL parameters section in WMT and add canonical tags to all of your pages and this will help make sure Google doesn't index these duplicate pages

[dooberry]

Thanks for the feedback Cody and Irving - very helpful indeed!