Duplicate Content Issue from using filters on a directory listing site

[dseo241]

I have a directory listing site of harpists and have alot of issues coming up that say:

Content that is identical (or nearly identical) to content on other pages of your site forces your pages to unnecessarily compete with each other for rankings.

Because this is a directory listing site the content is quite generic.The main issue appears to be coming from the functionality of the page. It appears that the "spider" is picking up each different choice of filter as a new page? If you have a look at this link you will see what I mean.

People searching the site can filter the results of the songs played by this harpist by changing the dropdowns etc... but for some reason the filter arguments are being picked up...? Do you have any good approaches to solving this issue?

A similar issue comes from the video pages for each harpist. They are being flagged as identical content - as there are currently no videos on the page.

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http://www.find-a-harpist.co.uk/user/39/videos

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http://www.find-a-harpist.co.uk/user/37/videos

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Do you have any suggestions?

Many thanks for taking the time to read this and respond.

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[dseo241]

Thank you both for you responses. Yes the site is relatively new. I shall implement your suggestions and hopefully they will do teh trick.

[Dr-Pete]

Is your site relatively new? I currently show no pages in the Google index at all, which makes the duplicate content issue a bit moot (at least in the short-term). The search filters and pagination are a bit different issues. You could META NOINDEX any pages with the filter parameters active, or rel-canonical them to the unfiltered version (as @Steve25 said). Since no pages are indexed yet, you could also just "nofollow" the filter links ("Title", etc.), which should help prevent those filtered versions getting crawled. Pagination (pages 2+ of search) is a trickier issue, but it might be best to just NOINDEX, FOLLOW those. You could also let Google know in Google Webmaster Tools that that page= parameter is for pagination (I've had that be hit-or-miss, but it is easy, relative to other solutions). For the empty profiles, it really depends on the scope. If you have a lot, I'd ideally want to code them to have META NOINDEX if they're empty. You can lift the NOINDEX once they have content posted. You'd have to do that dynamically, but it shouldn't be too tricky. That way, Google would see new pages only once they have some content in place.

[Steve25]

Could you set up canonical tags so that when users select certain criteria a parent page is shown in the canonical?