Crawl Diagnostics - nofollow - reducing duplicate pages

[chameleondm]

Hi

I'm looking at a crawl diagnostic report, I can see I have many duplicate pages, the reason for this is that when a brand filter is applied to a page. IE
www.mysite.com/mycategory - lets say this is the product listing page
www.mysite.com/category/mybrand - and this is the same page but with a brand filter applied
www.mysite.com/category/myotherbrand - and this is the same page but with a different brand filter applied

I had intially appendeded the meta title, description and keywords with some extra content if a brand filter was applied, because the page on the whole does have different content. IE I would have a custom meta information, H1 tag and products on that page just for that specific brand.
However I am wondering if these two pages are really just competing with each other as lots of the content will be the same.

Should I scrap that approach and use either nofollow on the brand filter link, or simply use a canonical.

Thanks, James

[GPainter]

The whole point of canonical is to do what your describing.

rel=calocial

Why specify a canonical page?

It's common for a site to have several pages listing the same set of products. For example, one page might display products sorted in alphabetical order, while other pages display the same products listed by price or by rating.

[chameleondm]

Hi, thanks for the reply, however the two pages with the brand filter do have different content, for example

Page 1a, trainers page with no filter applied, unique meta info

Page 1b, trainers page with Nike filter applied, unique meta info and has 20 products, all just Nike products

Page 1c, trainers page with Adidas filter applied, unique meta info and has 20 products, all just Adidas products

So all three pages have different content, its just that the 'combination page' 1a has products for both Nike and Adidas.

Hope that explains it better, I'm fully aware of the user for canonical but this is a bit of a grey area.

J

[MikeRoberts]

That is yet another reason Rel=canonical was created... for when one page is a subset of another page. E.g. Your Nike page is a subset of the Trainers page.

[chameleondm]

I guess the issue here is really to what extent my pages are considered a subset of another. The way my page is coded, controlled via the cms, the subset page could have a lot more content specific to the brand for that page. IE: Different meta, banners, brand information

So, yes, the actual products themselves are a simple subset, but the surrounding content may be quite unique to that brand. Therefore should I still use canonical, not sure.... thoughts???