noindex, nofollow being ignored for duplicate content trigger?

[JimHo]

We do not have a ban in Yahoo, but have been penalized out of the top 1000 off and on since March of 2005. Our site is an ecommerce site, and due to the product line there is substantial duplicate content (i.e a painting is available in seven frame groupings each of which requires a different page for display and pricing reasons.)

After our first penalty we placed the noindex, nofollow meta tags in six of the seven pages. We have been back in the SERPS on page one for our major keywords twice since the first penalty. Each time we were back for a short period, and then removed.

Is it possible that Yahoo ignores the noindex, nofollow tag and is hitting us with a duplicate content penalty?

[martinibuster]

Have you tried using a robots.txt to disallow the bots? That's really the best way to do it.

The other thing you can consider is putting a different description for each of the products, even if they're the same product. How many ways are there to describe the same thing? Searchers come up with many.

[JimHo]

maybe I am missing something. Every near duplicate page has the following in the head section:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">

I agree with you on the unique content, but it is very difficult to make up content on 6 out of 7 duplicate pages over 100 products without confusing the customer..