Duplicate content via dynamic URLs where difference is only parameter order?

[anthematic]

I have a question about the order of parameters in an URL versus duplicate content issues. The URLs would be identical if the parameter order was the same.

E.g.
www.example.com/page.php?color=red&size=large&gender=male versus
www.example.com/page.php?gender=male&size=large&color=red

How smart is Google at consolidating these, and do these consolidated pages incur any penalty (is their combined “weight” equal to their individual selves)?

Does Google really see these two pages as DISTINCT, or does it recognize that they are the same because they have the exact same parameters?

Is this worth fixing in or does it have a trivial impact?

If we have to fix it and can't change our CMS, should we set a preferred, canonical order for these URLs or 301 redirect from one version to the other?

Thanks a million!

[Dr-Pete]

To be fair to Highland, I do think canonical is a good bet here, but I just have to comment that I don't think Google handles these kinds of URLs very well. They should, in theory, but in my experience they rarely do. The problem with order variants is that you can easily spin 100s or 1000s of them and create serious indexation and ranking problems.

For this particular example, the canonical tag is probably best, but there may be cases where certain parameters have no particular value (like a "sort by" parameter). Those are sometimes better off blocked.

I cover a bunch of examples in my mega-post on duplicate content:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

[icecarats]

Agreed with Highland, this seems exactly the kind of problem canonical can fix. I wouldn't go down the road of 301ing because for parameters that simple you like aren't going to run into problems. The rule of thumb is you should act if you have more than two parameters in the URL (not sure where I read that), but I've seen Google 'figure out' up to 4 for some of my sites.

Another thing to check out is Google webmaster tools, you can set certain keywords and url parameters there to help Google 'learn' how to crawl your site. This Google blog posting might help too:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html

[Highland]

Google should recognize the difference but, just to be safe, I would add a canonical to your page so you don't have anything to worry about.