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That would definitely be considered duplicate content.  There are a few things you can do to fix it, but rather than wasting a bunch of time writing it out here I would recommend visiting the link below for more detailed info:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

As for my situation it worked out quite nicely, I just wasn't patient enough.  After about 2 months the issue corrected itself for the most part and I was able to reduce about a million "waste" pages out of the index.  This is a very large site so losing a million pages in a handful of categories helped me gain in a whole lot of other areas and spread the crawler around to more places that were important for us.

I also spent some time doing some restructuring of internal linking from some of our more authoritative pages that I believe also assisted with this, but in my case rel="canonical" worked out pretty nicely.  Just took some time and patience.

thx

Yeah that is why I am not real excited about using robots.txt or even a no index in this instance.  They are not session ids, but more like:

www.example.com/catgeoryname/a,

www.example.com/catgeoryname/b

www.example.com/catgeoryname/c

etc

which would show all products that start with those letters.  There are a lot of other filters too, such as color, size, etc, but the bottom line is I point all those back to just www.example.com/categoryname using rel canonical and am not understanding why it isn't working properly.

There are a large number of urls like this because of the way the faceted navigation works and I have considered no index, but somewhat concerned as we do get links to some of these urls and would like to maintain some of that link juice.   The warning shows up in Google Webmaster tools when Googlebot finds a large number of urls.  The rest of the message reads like this:

"Googlebot encountered extremely large numbers of links on your site. This may indicate a problem with your site's URL structure. Googlebot may unnecessarily be crawling a large number of distinct URLs that point to identical or similar content, or crawling parts of your site that are not intended to be crawled by Googlebot. As a result Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all of the content on your site."

rel canonical should fix this, but apparently it is not

First off, I just wanted to mention I did post this on one other forum so I hope that is not completely against the rules here or anything. Just trying to get an idea from some of the pros at both sources.  Hope this is received well.  Now for the question.....

"Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site:"

Gotta love these messages in GWT. Anyway, I wanted to get some other opinions here so if anyone has experienced something similar or has any recommendations I would love to hear them.

First off, the site is very large and utilizes faceted navigation to help visitors sift through results. I have implemented rel=canonical for many months now to have each page url that is created based on the faceted nav filters, push back to the main category page. However, I still get these damn messages from Google every month or so saying that they found too many pages on the site. My main concern obviously is wasting crawler time on all these pages that I am trying to do what they ask in these instances and tell them to ignore and find the content on page x.

So at this point I am thinking about possibly using robots.txt file to handle these, but wanted to see what others around here thought before I dive into this arduous task. Plus I am a little ticked off that Google is not following a standard they helped bring to the table.

Thanks for those who take the time to respond in advance.

As has been stated it doesn't matter which one you choose, but since you do have links to both, I would pick the one with the better link profile. The one with the most or better quality links would be my choice.

It will take time, but you can help it along by using the url removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools.  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

There could be a number of reasons.  Perhaps Google has reset the PR because of a transfer of ownership or they found the site practicing shady link tactics and removed their PR. Then again it could be that they have established a lot of quality links since the last Google PR update which mozRank is finding but Google is not yet showing.

Without knowing more details it will be hard to give a precise answer, but keep in mind even what is shown in Google PR toolbar or other pr checking tools are just a snapshot at some point in time taken prior to the last update, so it is out of date and really shouldn't be bothered with.  Unless, of course, you are concerned with the buying and selling of links, which is a practice frowned upon by Google.

Sorry for the delay in response, I didn't notice this until now.  Anyway, I think yolu are referring to Zemanta and Rand talked about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-valuable-link-building-services

Funny enough I was just reading a recent article on forbes on this topic.  You can check it out here: http://blogs.forbes.com/marketshare/2011/01/23/why-the-news-release-is-worthless-in-todays-social-media-age/

I think that having a solid social network and using places like HARO, you are going to get a much better response for the effort you put in.  I think some of the cases where this can still be effective is when you have a really good newsworthy story (not a sales pitch) and an exceptional title that will not be jumped past by potential publishers.

As for a company to go to for pr's I have used prweb with good results in the past, but rarely use them anymore as we find HARO, MyBlogGuest, and building strong social networks to be far better performers.

Sorry for the delay in response, I didn't notice this until now.  Anyway, I think yolu are referring to Zemanta and Rand talked about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-valuable-link-building-services

There could be a number of reasons.  Perhaps Google has reset the PR because of a transfer of ownership or they found the site practicing shady link tactics and removed their PR. Then again it could be that they have established a lot of quality links since the last Google PR update which mozRank is finding but Google is not yet showing.

Without knowing more details it will be hard to give a precise answer, but keep in mind even what is shown in Google PR toolbar or other pr checking tools are just a snapshot at some point in time taken prior to the last update, so it is out of date and really shouldn't be bothered with.  Unless, of course, you are concerned with the buying and selling of links, which is a practice frowned upon by Google.

It will take time, but you can help it along by using the url removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools.  https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

As has been stated it doesn't matter which one you choose, but since you do have links to both, I would pick the one with the better link profile. The one with the most or better quality links would be my choice.