How to deal with category browsing and duplicate content

[IanTheScot]

On an ecommerce site there are typically a lot of pages that may appear to be duplications due to category browse results where the only difference may be the sorting by price or number of products per page.

How best to deal with this? Add nofollow to the sorting links? Set canonical values that ignore these variables? Set cononical values that match the category home page?

Is this even a possible problem with Panda or spiders in general?

[john4math]

For Google, you can go into your Webmaster Tools, and go to the Site configuration > URL parameters page.  You can set the parameters in your URLs to things like "Sorts", "Paginates", or "Narrows", so that Google will know how the parameter changes the info on the page.  Once Google knows how the parameter effects the page, presumably they'll give the right links and display URLs in their search results.

[IanTheScot]

That makes sense but should I be doing anything with rel canonical to make sure that each sort option doesn't display a different canonical url?

[IanTheScot]

Can Google deal with "search engine safe" parameters? I added our sort stuff to Webmaster tools but I'm not sure Google knows what to do and can't find any info on this.