Redundant categorization - "boys" and "girls" category. Any other suggestions than implementing filtering?

[Inevo]

One of our clients (a children's clothing company) has split their categories (outwear, tops, shoes) between boys and girls - There's one category page for girls outwear, and one category for boys outwear. I am suspecting that this redundant categorisation is diluting link juice and rankings for the related search queries.

Important points:

• The clothes themselves are rather gender-neutral, girl's sweaters don't differ that much from the boy's sweaters.
• Our keyword research indicates that norwegians' search queries are also pretty gender neutral - people are generally searching after "children's dresses", "shoes for kids", "snowsuits", etc. So these gender specific categories are not really reflective of people's search behavior.

I acknowledge that implementing a filter for "boys" and "girls" would be the best way to solve this redundant categorization, but that would simply be to expensive for our client.

I'm thinking that some sort of canonicalisation would be the best approach to solve this issue. Are there any other suggestions or comments to this?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

Why not do parent category by type of clothing - "snowsuites", "sweaters" and so on and then have boy-girls filters inside?

Or have clothing categories and have boys-girls filters over everything? This way there is no "issue" with extra or redundant categorization.

[MattAntonino]

"Why not do parent category by type of clothing - "snowsuites", "sweaters" and so on and then have boy-girls filters inside?"

"I acknowledge that implementing a filter for "boys" and "girls" would be the best way to solve this redundant categorization, but that would simply be to expensive for our client."

That being said, canonicals will help direct the juice to the right (/outwear/) page and away from /outwear/girls and /outwear/boys.

The only other option I can see is to have an overview category (/outwear/) and then deindex the subcategories in robots.

disallow: /outwear/girls*
disallow: /outwear/boys*

But that only helps Google with what you already have. If someone directly links the /outwear/boys/ page, that will get lost. So canonicals would seem to be the way to go in the absence of filters.