Nofollow on these internal links?

[rowleysit-259892]

On an x-cart ecommerce website we have, seomoz has picked up a lot of duplicate content, based on URLs that are different, but are essentially the same page.

These come from Fitlers, that allow a page to show only certain colours and styles, reordering page by price etc, and also the page 2, page 3 etc of a category:

All the below are '4ft-bedding.html'

http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?filter=1&value=Pink

http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?page=2

http://www.textilesdirect.co.uk/store/4ft-Bedding.html?sort=price&view_all=Y

I've now changed all these internal links to rel="nofollow" on the a tag.

Is that the correct and best way to sort?

I might be mistaken on when I did this update and when the last report was ran, but on the SEOmoz crawling report, it still has the above as problem pages.

thanks!

[Tompt]

Your better off using rel="canonical" to solve the problem if you can:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

It's potentially more difficult to arrange than the nofollows but it was put in place to resolve exactly this sort of problem.

[rowleysit-259892]

ah, I see... I'd forgotten about the canonical, I've never used before.

That could be difficult to arrange, as all categories are dynamic to what the store owner decides they're selling, and also it's one html/php template used across every category page.

Would it involve lots of hard coded ifs to accomodate the different categories, and then revise later down the road if/when the products have changed?

There is a module that can be bought for Xcart called CDSEO that goes some way to sorting this I believe. Maybe I need to cough up for that...

[Tompt]

Well you could limit things with robots.txt instead, but that's a bit of a blanket block. It would probably be better than nofollow though.

Using noindex and nofollow in conjunction would also likely be better than just nofollow by itself. It's a long way from the elegance and usefulness of rel="canonical" but it is easier.