Large Scale Ecommerce. How To Deal With Duplicate Content

[LukeyJamo]

Hi,

One of our clients has a store with over 30,000 indexed pages but less then 10,000 individual products and make a few hundred static pages.

Ive crawled the site in Xenu (it took 12 hours!) and found it to by a complex mess caused by years of hack add ons which has caused duplicate pages, and weird dynamic parameters being indexed

The inbound link structure is diversified over duplicate pages, PDFS, images so I need to be careful in treating everything correctly.

I can likely identify & segment blocks of 'thousands' of URLs and parameters which need to be blocked, Im just not entirely sure the best method.

Dynamic Parameters

I can see the option in GWT to block these - is it that simple? (do I need to ensure they are deinxeded and 301d?

Duplicate Pages

Would the best approach be to mass 301 these pages and then apply a no-index tag and wait for it to be crawled?

Thanks for your help.

[AnthonyMangia]

As far as both duplicate content issues and dynamic parameters, you may want to look into using the rel="canonical" tag instead of the noindex tag.

• Matt Cutts: Learn About the Canonical Link Element in 5 Minutes
• Google Webmaster Central: About rel="canonical"
• Rand Fishkin: Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps