ECommerce Filtering Affect on SEO

[AndieF]

I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages.

It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing).

The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/

My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content.

My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL)

• /department/2/17-7-4/10/
• /department/2/**10/**17-7-4/

But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically.

Tricky.

So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?

[customerparadigm.com]

Andie -

We work on a lot of eCommerce sites with similar left-hand navigation filters.

I think that the thing to keep in mind is that these pages are often like search results pages, and require a human to choose options to create those URLs.  As a result, they shouldn't be pages that a typical crawl bot would find.

That said, each eCommerce system acts differently, and it's possible that permanent links are created that are added to a site map. Or, it's possible that Google's bots are starting to check boxes on eCommerce filters to better mimic human behavior.  After all, Google has created self-driving cars.

The data driven approach: I would check to see if any of these pages are showing up in Google Webmaster tools to see if it is, indeed, an issue, before trying to go crazy about duplicate content.

Hope this helps,
-- Jeff