Boat broker - issues with duplicate content and indexing search results

[pbscreative]

Hello,

I have read a lot about optimising product pages and not indexing search results or category pages as ideally a person should be directed straight to a product page.

I am interested in how best to approach a site that is listing second hand products for sale - essentially a marketplace of second hand goods (in my case, www.boatshed.com - international boat brokers).

For example, we currently have 5 Colvic Sailer 26 boats for sale across the world - that is 5 boats of the same make and model but differing years, locations, sellers and prices.

My concern is with search results and 'category' pages. Unlike typical e-commerce sites, when someone searches for a 'Colvic sailer 26 for sale' I want them to go to a search results style page as it is more useful for them to see a list of boats than one random one that Google decides is most important (or possibly one it can match by location).

Currently we have 3 different URL types to show search results style pages (i.e. paginated lists of boats that include name, image and short description):
manufacturer URL's e.g. http://www.boatshed.com/colvic-manufacturer-145.html
category URL's e.g. barges http://www.boatshed.com/barges-category-55.html
and normal search results e.g. dosearch.php?form_boattype_textbox=&....

I have noindexed the search results pages but our category and manufacturer URLs show up in search results and ultimately these are pages I want people to land on. I am however getting duplicate content warnings in Moz. Most boats are in several categories and all will come up on 1 manufacturer and one manufacturer and model page.

Both sets of URL's are in my opinion needed; lots of users search for exact makes / models and lots of users just search for the type of boat e.g. 'barge for sale' so both sets of landing pages are useful.

Any suggestions or thoughts greatly appreciated

Thanks

Ben

[gazzerman1]

I have run into this same problem in multiple industries.

John Mueller at Google has answered my question multiple times on this subject saying that internal duplicate content is NOT an issue and especially if you can justify it being there a manual review of sorts would not identify a problem. Google will make a judgement call on what the best page to serve is by the users query.

In your case you are doing what should be done, the least helpful page is the actual product page and in many cases in the past I have no indexed them.

This same problem arises for many industries, real estate, office space, used cars etc...