Static and Dynamic Catalog Pages

Can this trigger the "duplicate-filter"?

[fabfurs]

Our site has duplicate content stored as an "HTML" catalog with an index that is auto generated by our shopcart software to help crawlers that may not be capable of following dynamic URLs.

Only the product content is an exact duplicate without any HTML formatting (not user friendly), the product images alt tag, title, meta stuff and links back to the dynamic catalog are unique.

What’s the consensus on this type of dupe content? It is not provided to dupe the user or improve ranking, the user is not redirected so could it still trigger a SERPs filter?

[ThomasB]

I don't really get you, but why don't you disallow the dynamic part for spiders and let just the static part be crawled? That would save you from any duplicate content discussions.

[fabfurs]

Well, I much prefer it when intelligent robots can parse my dynamic URLS. Then users coming to my site via these intelligent SEs results land directly on the shopping cart pages as opposed to landing on a very unappealing "generated" static page.

I also acquire about 5% of my shoppers via the static pages from other SEs so it's not an option to drop them without implementing a solution. Even if we do loose around 25% of those visitors that fail to navigate into the site from the static pages.

Maybe I should start another thread in the correct forum to search for an alternative approch to the dynamic URLs and thereby avoid this duplicate-filter question.

[ThomasB]

good idea. There are plenty of people around that have perfect solutions about handling dynamic sites.
Avoiding duplicate content as long as it is not necessary is the best solution for the problem you stated, imho.

[doc_z]

I didn't see the problem with the actual situation apart from the fact that PR is distributed over more pages (i.e. is diluted). Of course, Google might either merge the two different pages or remove one of them (this depends on). But as long as it doesn't matter which of them (dynamic or static page) are removed, I don't see a problem.

[ukgimp]

robots.txt the dynamic stuff out?