ECommerce product listed in multiple places, best SEO practice?

[spiralsites]

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?

[spiralsites]

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

[SteveWebb]

Short answer: using rel="canonical" to point to the default URL for each product will solve the product-related duplicate content issue.

As for the "best" way to solve this problem, I actually prefer using a robots meta tag with "noindex, follow" attributes on each duplicate product page.

Since the duplicate URLs only exist for navigational purposes, I'd prefer to keep them out of the search engine indexes altogether.

Once you have this issue squared away, be sure to read through these resources for other important eCommerce considerations:

Perfecting On-Page Optimization for Ecommerce Websites

Holy Grail of eCommerce Conversion Optimization

[spiralsites]

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.