Another E-commerce Canonical Question

[elcrazyhorse]

Hi guys,

Quick question:  one of our clients has an e-commerce site with a very poor canonical tag setup and thousands of pages of duplicate content.

Let's use this as an example:

BRAND > Category > Type > Color
Four separate pages/URLs.

The BRAND page lists all products.
The Category page lists all BRAND products for that category.
The Type page lists all BRAND products of a specific type in that category.
The Color page lists all BRAND products of a specific type in that category of a specific color.

Anyway, these generate four separate URLs:

/BRAND
/BRAND/Category
/BRAND/Category-Type
/BRAND/Category-Type-Color

Avoiding duplicate content and product listings, I would appreciate your proposed canonicalization strategy/feedback.

[elcrazyhorse]

Thank you for your reply, Alan.

To confirm, the pages I listed in my initial post have nothing but product listings on each of them.  Some pages have only a few products.  The client already has a self-referencing canonical tag on each of those pages, but is asking about canonicalizing everything to /BRAND

Any additional feedback would be helpful.

Thank you.

[AlanMosley]

I would not worry, if they are are duplicate content, then google will rank one above the others. duplcate content is not penalty, thin content can be a problem, where you have a majority of your site as the same page, with minor changes. but what you put forward should not be a problem.