How would you deal with eCommerce sorts?

[CindyAlbright]

I am reviewing a website that has different activities, and there are many ways to sort them. The issue is that the website is essentially displaying the same information, but in different sorts. Take a look at this search page:

http://www.kijubi.com/AC-Fishing

You are looking for fishing trips here, but you can sort it by city, region, and category. I have decided to "no index" some of these sorts, but I am afraid they might be picking up some long tail traffic on the city and region sorts. For example, "newport beach fishing trips", something like that.

Any suggestions on how to deal with removing all of these duplicate sorts, while still maintaining the traffic that may be received by sorting with some long tail terms?

[MikeGracia]

Nice answer

[AlanBleiweiss]

I'd expand on Ryan's suggestion as a consideration to just say that you need to be aware that Google continues to work on figuring out how to tap into AJAX accessed content.  They may be bad at it now (they are), yet one day they could eventually have it figured out, at which point the duplicate content issue comes back.

Might not be in the next short while - maybe never, yet something  to be aware of.

[RyanPurkey]

Good answer.

[AdoptionHelp]

I would change the sorting to be dynamic, probably with AJAX. That way your users still get the feature but you're not duplicating your content across URLs. I'd target the long tail with landing pages, rather than re-sorted copies of my content.

[onlinemediadirect]

we found ourselves in this very position and it was at a point where we were looking out for issues for a site not indexing.

We removed it but then again you find many examples where it isnt a major issue. Maybe try to combat that with canonicals ?

[AlanBleiweiss]

I always recommend clients implement either noindex/follow on sort methods, or block sorting altogether (the first choice being preferred).  If there are specific sort methods that consistently provide valuable conversions, these can be considered to be set up as a separate "evergreen" link on the site, but where you would need to add unique content to the page - enough to ensure it reduces (as much as possible) the duplicate content factor.