Sale Pages On An eCommerce Website

[Nigel_Carr]

I have a client who sells 50 brands of shoes. At the moment the developer has a noindex/nofollow tag on all sale pages which is wrong as around 10% of site activity revolves around those pages. The structure looks like this:

1. For Cats/Sub Cats

site/sale
site/womens/sale
site/womens/shoe/sale
site/womens/shoes/ballerinas/sale

For every cat/subcat - there are 10 cats and average 5 subcats per cat so 50 pages of sale.

2. For Brands

site/brand
site/brand/womens
site/sale/brand
site/sale/womens/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/brand
site/sale/womens/cat/subcat/brand

So each brand can have four sale pages on top of its own brand page. 50 brands x 54 = around 2700. Now no one is going to start writing 2700 pieces of additional on page content (although Meta is OK! ) and we risk further diluting the brand pages we need to show highly for,  so we need to do something.

Should we

Category Pages:

1. Allow all sale cat and subcat pages to proliferate through Google? or
2. Canonicalise all sale sub category pages back to category
3. Caonicalise all category and Subcategory pages back to sale/womens

Brand Pages:

1. Allow all sale brand pages to proliferate through Google ?
2. Canonicalise Sub Cat brand pages back to sale/category/brand
3. Canonicalise Sub Cat and Cat back to sale/brand

Note the lower pages never do well in search. If you search a brand + Sale in Google it is always the site/brand page that comes up, never the sale version (This is from research on other similar sites and my own analysis)

Same with Sub Cats - eg, Brand + Subcat - it's always site/brand that comes up first wand has the highest PA.

Also we can't analyse any of these sale pages in MOZ or anywhere else as they are not in search at all having been no indexed.

That's my conundrum for today, Any thoughts would be appreciated!