Datagrid sorting causing duplicate content - workaround?

[confused]

Hello Everyone. I will try to explain my situation best as possible. I have a site done in asp.net which displays search results in tables of data. Each result has a mod_rewrite to create a clean url, i.e. abc.com/a-1.aspx

Problem is each page has a 4 sorting functions... i.e. sort by price, date, etc. Each of these pages also get clean urls (abc.com/a-1a.aspx, abc.com/a-1b.aspx) but it's the same content just the results in a different order... therefore 5 total pages / urls with virtually the same content... which is going to be a big problem.

Need thoughts on what is the best way to handle this so to not get a "duplicate content" penalty?

One idea was to add <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> on the postback urls (but not the default result page)... but is this safe with all SE's? Any thoughts or workarounds greatly apprciated!

[TheNige]

why not just have the sort as an additional querystring parameter instead of incorporating it into your URL?

[confused]

Not sure what you mean... I think that my mod_rewrite is doing this automatically?

[BradleyT]

he means a-1a.aspx?sortby=ColumnName

Then you only need a-1a.aspx with 4 different sortby parameters (sortby=Price, sortby=date) instead of 5 pages.

[confused]

Got it... boy do I feel dumb..