Best way to remove duplicate content with categories?

[kysizzle6]

I have duplicate content for all of the products I sell on my website due to categories and subcategories.

Ex: http://www.shopgearinc.com/products/product/stockfeeder-af38.php

http://www.shopgearinc.com/products/co-matic-power-feeders/stockfeeder-af38.php

http://www.shopgearinc.com/products/co-matic-power-feeders/heavy-duty-feeders/stockfeeder-af38.php

Above are 3 urls to the same title and content.  I use a third party developer backend system so doing canonicalization seems difficult as I don't have full access.

What is the best to get rid of this duplicate content.  Can I do it through webmaster tools or should I pay the developer to do the canonicalization or a 301 redirect?  Any suggestions?

Thanks

[Prospector-Plastics]

We had the same problem with our site. Finding the best performing or preferred page of the 3 versions is where you should have your developer place the canonical. Then the other two pages should 301 to that page.

When we did this on our site, it cleaned things up and helped in rankings.

[NakulGoyal]

I agree with Nathan on the canonical tag. You could also work with your developer back end system and look into configuration issues and see if there's a way for the application to always have a consistent product level URL. It's the same product. It's being exposed in multiple categories or multiple levels of categories. Regardless, it's the same product. There's no reason for them to be unique product URLs. See if you can work with them to get rid of the root cause.

If not, canonical is definitely the way to go. Unfortunately, there's isn't another way like robots.txt exclusions etc that should be considered.