Products in Multiple Categories = Duplicate Content?

[TonyMc]

I'm doing a little reorganizing of one of my sites and I wondered how everyone else handles this. I have products that would fit in multiple categories and I would like to let visitors browse by both. Being in a different category would cause the URL to be slightly different for the same product. Would this equal duplicate content? If so, how do you deal with this?

[Morgenhund]

We have most products in multiple directories; since no directory listing content exactly repeats, this is not a dublicate content case:

Dir 1
Product A
Product B
Product C

Dir 2
Product A
Product B
Product X
Product Y

Parts of content repeat themselves, but since most sites novadays are built with standart building blocks (i.e. standart header on every page is not treated as a dublicate content), this is not a problem.

[shri]

Can you make the link something like

www.example.com/product.php?productid=123

That way, you can target the same link from different categories.

The main problem is not internal dupes... but duplicating info from other sites.

[TonyMc]

I don't think there's really any way to not have products in multiple categories. I will need to upgrade my cart. The newest version doesn't tack on the category to the end of the URL. That will make it so there's only one URL per product and solve the problem.

Thanks for the help.