Problems with ecommerce filters causing duplicate content.

[Silkstream]

We have an ecommerce website with 700 pages. Due to the implementation of filters, we are seeing upto 11,000 pages being indexed where the filter tag is apphended to the URL. This is causing duplicate content issues across the site.

We tried adding "nofollow" to all the filters, we have also tried adding canonical tags, which it seems are being ignored. So how can we fix this?

We are now toying with 2 other ideas to fix this issue;

1. adding "no index" to all filtered pages

2. making the filters uncrawble using javascript

Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so what did you do to combat this and was it successful?

[Silkstream]

Thank you both Lesley & Jim!

This tool is exactly what we needed! Fingers crossed now we have resolved the issues we had with all that duplicate content.

How long has the parameter tool been available?? I never even knew it existed!

[JMagary]

Check your Google Webmaster Tools and see if you need to use the Parameter tool.  There are settings there that you can use to tell google not to index parameters.  You can also confirm that Google is not under-indexing your site, in which case you don't have to worry about the parametered URLs at all. If you have canonical tags in place that will do the trick.

[LesleyPaone]

This might help.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/08/configuring-url-parameters-in-webmaster.html