Site is still in testing but as an example the products are for cars and the same product can fit multiple cars, hence why it may be in more than one place

Another option i thought of would be that the other pages I simply add a no index meta tag to so it only indexes the one url.

The reason I say this as from experience of how seomoz crawls sites and some pages which i know are not duplicate content yet i have had many pages for many sites get tagged for duplicate content simply because there isn't enough of a difference on the page.

The product pages wouldb e very much the same as really all that would be different is the breadcrumb trail and possibly some other links 95% of the pages would be the same as they are the same product.

We have an eCommerce site we have built for a customer and the products are allowed to appear in more than one product category within the web site.

Now I know this is a bad idea from a duplicate content point of view, But we are going to allow the customer to select which out of the multiple categories the product appears in will be the default category.

This will mean we will have a way of defining what the default url is for a product.

So am I correct in thinking all the other urls where the product appears we should add a rel canonical to these pages pointing to the default url to stop duplicate content?

Is this the best way?

Many of our e-com sites we build for customers have drop down menus to help the user easily find products without having to click -

Example: http://www.customandcommercial.com/

But this then causes the report to trigger too many on page links

We do have a site map and a google site map

So should I put code in place not to follow the drop down menu link items or leave in place?

cheers

so even though the search could generate lots of extra pages you think I should leave the pages as is?

I have a customer site where you can search for products they sell

url format is:

domainname/search/keywords/

keywords being what the user has searched for.

This means the number of pages can be limitless as the client has over 7500 products.

or should I simply rel canonical the search page or simply no follow it?

Another option i thought of would be that the other pages I simply add a no index meta tag to so it only indexes the one url.

The reason I say this as from experience of how seomoz crawls sites and some pages which i know are not duplicate content yet i have had many pages for many sites get tagged for duplicate content simply because there isn't enough of a difference on the page.

The product pages wouldb e very much the same as really all that would be different is the breadcrumb trail and possibly some other links 95% of the pages would be the same as they are the same product.