Pagination, Duplicated Content and SEO

[suarve]

Hi,

I have an ecommerce store that will have tons of products, these are split into categories.

E.g.
Category A
- Product 1
- Product 22
etc.

Category B
- Product 3
- Product 4
etc.

Now due to the sheer number of products in each category it makes sense to page the category listing pages E.g. cat-listing.php?p=1 etc. So i've generated the usual page number links with forward and back links too.

I can across an article about duplicate content and paging was mentioned as major cause - I'd never really thought of this so it got me wondering as to my next course of action.

Do I add a nofollow to all the paging links (as cat-listing.php?p=1 is the same as cat-listing.php> This should be ok as I have related product on each product detail page, all my products listed on my sitemap page in a huge list and categories (minus the paging data) listed on the right hand side of each page.

What are your thoughts.

Oh yer, this is for a new site too.

Many Thanks

EDIT: as if its so late

EDIT2: also, I have my category page urls rewritten E..g domain.com/cat/keywords-c1.php

 

[daz]

Are the pages exactly the same?

If they're absolutely identical, have a canonical version and re-write one URL to the other....

Edit: If they're not identical, but bear a striking resemblance, it is possible you'd be marked down - but generally speaking, I've only ever seen duplicate content affect ranking across different domains. You can always use robots.txt to disallow access to content you don't want spiders to see - I don't think no-follow actually works that well these days.

 

[gord]

If it's in the same domain and quite clearly a store then Google should not penalise you. They recognise that descriptions for items and images are probably the same across stores so they are a bit more lenient.

If you think, a Panasonic TV probably has 1 image and 1 description and 1 name, but is sold by many vendors. Google can't exactly penalise the vendors for duplicating the content, because it is still true and relevant information.

 

[suarve]

Ta for replies, I hate finding issues like this As with the majority of SEO issues like this no one has a firm solution.

Have done a bit more reading and some people recommend giving each page a different title and meta tag, aswell as amending your h1 tag. So I guess I could change each opf these tags to include 'page xxx').

The category listing page (where my productes are paged) are structured as followed - nothing overly out of the ordinary:

Title: Cat Name
Meta Desc: cat desc
h1: Cat Name
Bit of a paragraph about the cat and then products links to the product detail page to each product
My paging links are simply Prev p1, p2....... Next

My URL was oiriginally structured as follows: www.site.com/cat/cat-name-keyword.php and displayed all the products - this is the url that appears in the menu on every page.

I added p=1, p=2 etc. to each page to split the records - these are my pagination links: www.site.com/cat/cat-name-keyword.php?p=1, www.site.com/cat/cat-name-keyword.php?p=2 etc.

Now the only blatent duplicate content I can see is between www.site.com/cat/cat-name-keyword.php and www.site.com/cat/cat-name-keyword.php?p=1 as my code sets the page number to 1 if no page exists.