Should we block urls like this - domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=ascℴ=price&price=1 within the robots.txt?

[MonsterWeb28]

I've recently added a campaign within the SEOmoz interface and received an alarming number of errors ~9,000 on our eCommerce website. This site was built in Magento, and we are using search friendly url's however most of our errors were duplicate content / titles due to url's like: domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=asc&order=price&price=1 and domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=asc&order=price&price=4.

Is this hurting us in the search engines? Is rogerbot too good?

What can we do to cut off bots after the ".html?" ? Any help would be much appreciated

[sferrino]

I had the same problem on http://www.tokenrock.com because I was doing a lot of URL Rewriting, it's a CMS system I wrote, but the same issue apply. I went from 7000+ errors according to SEOMoz, and I'm down to 700. Here's a few things I did:

Use canonicals on everything you possibly can.

Redirect 301 the items in the SERPS that are identical.

I'm not familiar with Magento to help you work though that side of it.

Having a link like: domainname/leather-chairs-244-16-price-1.html would work much better.

The ones you have listed are because somehow somewhere you (the site) have a link to it.

Unfortunately some of the CMS's are written by developers who don't fully understand SEO and why the ? is a bad thing.