What to do if pages have different options which looks like duplicate

[brandon0401]

Hi, all my main pages, I have different user options like bg color, font size etc

so the main page is

www.example.com/subject

and has a couple links

www.example.com/index.php?category=148&font=inc

www.example.com/index.php?category=148&bgcolor=black

which changes those options

SO I am noticing when running a couple tools, I have 3-4 duplicate titles, descriptions, pages for those on each page. I always want to reduce this and have my main page www.example.com/subject come up in SE main. I have seen some of the www.example.com/index.php?category=148&bgcolor=black in google for those main pages.

So I hope this is clear enough. How should I handle this? Not sure if I should just 301 redirect each time it has queries defined or what? thanks

[jonrichd]

From your post, I'm assuming that your'e using php to create your pages. I'm also assuming that you are evaluating the various items in the query string to determine how to display the page.

Why not evaluate the various items in the query string before sending out any HTML code. If any of the values are set, then have your php code stick in a robots noindex metatag in the head section of the html.

This should work assuming you are not using empty values in your query strings, e.g. page.php?category=&font=&bgcolor=

Of course if one of the items defines the page content (like category), you wouldn't want to include it in your test .. only the optional items should be tested.