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I think you're right. Again, thanks for the well-informed response. I will take a lot of what you have just said into consideration. I also side with you about the duplicate issues. I may be a bit cynical here, but I have always found it hard to believe that Google will ever give us the complete truth.

Thank you for your well-informed response, Peter. You are right, though it is tedious, I still have to do it.

In regards to product duplicates severely harming my client's ability to rank, I am not quite sure if that's true. Google has wrote extensive material about duplicate content and how it's a myth that it affects ranking. I am not quite sure how truthful that is, but here's a link to one of those articles:

http://www.spottedpanda.com/2011/seo-news/confirmed-seo-facts-matt-cutts/

As for not seeing the duplicate product URLs in action, that's simply because the site is ground-floor. I inherited this project about a month and a half-ago from a design company who only built her a beautiful site. They did not optimize one thing for her. What's worse is that they used this heavily, technically involved cart software called ProductCart. The cart uses .Asp technology, which I am not sure if you aware of this, but many servers aren't built anymore to handle this legacy coding format.

The real problem I am facing, per @activitysuper response, is that the link in the cat is the same the as the link in products section. What I am saying is that there's a completely different cat that also has that same product but with a different URL.

You are both right, this is probably something I can remedy on the server-side. I was just merely throwing this out there to determine how other SEOs deal with having the same product in multiple categories.

Thanks for your time.

How do you claim to be part of a community when all you offer is criticisms and for that matter complete ignorance? Do me a favor and never waste my time with such an ignorant response again. You know nothing about me, my client or the background of the situation.

Hi all,

My client babyblingstreet.com. She sells baby and toddler clothing. Now a lot of the links on her site contain the same products. For instance: if you go to "What's new" you can find those same products in let's say her "Sale Items" link category.

The real problem with this is let's say my client sells a green dress and someone accesses it through the "baby and toddler dresses" category. And let's say this URL has 10 links pointing to it. Now, let's say someone else accesses this same green dress through the "What's new" category. And let's say this particular URL has 10 links pointing to it. Instead of having 20 links pointing to one URL about the green dress, I now have 10 links pointing to one URL and 10 pointing to another URL even though both URLs feature the exact same green dress.

In this particular example I would want to make the URL of the green dress in the "baby and toddler clothing" section be the canonical URL. So that means I would have to use this canonical tag on the green dress URL that's in the "what's new" category and let's say also the "sale items" category. This could get very tedious if my client has 200+ products. So I am wondering if I have to place a canonical tag on every URL that displays the green dress?

More importantly, I would like to know other people's strategies for indexing e-commerce sites that have the same product featured in multiple categories throughout the site.

I hope this makes sense. Thanks for your time.