Product sorting and dynamic urls

[teatable]

On our weekly SEOmoz crawls, we get thousands of warnings about overly dynamic URLs as a result of our product sorting options at the top of our category pages.  It seems like the ability to sort products by price, name, etc., is nice for the customer.  For SEO is this really a problem or can we ignore these warnings?

[TellThemEverything]

Yes, you should fix it. Make sure that only one version of that page is indexed - presumably the one that a user first sees before sorting/filtering/etc. When I say one version though, I really mean one version for each category, and don't forget paging - let the SE's index each page.

Just hide all the sorting/filtering versions, the best method is to add a noindex, follow meta tag

[RyanKent]

James is absolutely correct.This is a SEO issue, and you do need to address it. I would like to add a bit more clarification.

Let's say you have a page that shows sweaters. You can sort that page by the metrics you indicated. When that happens you have various pages as follows:

mysite.com/sweaters

mysite.com/sweaters?sort=price&dir=asc

mysite.com/sweaters?sort=price&dir=desc

mysite.com/sweaters?sort=name&dir=asc

If you have no sort options, then you have 1 sweater page. If you have 7 sort options, you have 15 sweater pages. Which one should google index? Customer #1 links to the page sorted by price, meanwhile customer #2 links to the page sorted alphabetically. Google doesn't know what to do...unless you tell them.

All the various pages should be canonicalized. Each of these pages should contain a line of code in their header similar to:

That tag tells search engines that the original URL is the one you wish indexed in search engines, and that all the various pages offering different sort orders are copies of the original page.

[TellThemEverything]

Yes rel canonical is an option too - BUT please be sure to do it correctly if you have pagination. Don't point page 2, page 3 etc back at page 1...

So you should end up with canonical's like this:

or

or

etc

[teatable]

Thank you, I was guessing that might be the thing to do.

[teatable]

Thank you for the details.

[teatable]

I see, thank you.