I love the advice admin, tedster gives one member in a WebmasterWorld thread. The member describes that he has several pages, all with the same content, but sorted differently.
For example, he has a page on pineapple chairs (love going back to my Big Blue Pineapple Chair example). You can view the main pineapple chair landing page, you can then sort the page by price either highest to low or lowest to high, you can also sort by popularity, sizes and colors. So you have several pages, the same content, just displayed differently.
Check out tedster's response:
For a site that is just now instituting sort pages, I agree that restricting which urls get indexed can be wise, especially if the site doesn't have really strong PR. However, your site already has the sort pages in place, correct? I've seen lots of people try to 'fix' something because of something they read, and they end up hurting their business.So I was wondering if you see some signs that your sort pages are in some way problematic. In other words, Google may already be handing your urls quite nicely for you. If so, you might cause a problem when you're just trying to make something better.
On the other hand, if there are symptoms of trouble -- then yes, I agree that a simple title change is probably not enough to fix things and you will want to exclude the sort pages from being indexed to see if that helps.
Often people have a set up that would be considered duplicate content. But often the search engines handle those pages fine. Obviously, if your pages are suffering due to duplicate content, you should fix the issue. How? Duplicate content tips here, which was a great thread and conversation on itself.
Don't fix what ain't broken, or what others (search engines) don't perceive to be broken.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
