Passing information to another page without creating duplicate pages.

[james1892]

Hi,
I have a e-commerce site, I want to have multiple colours and apparently, I should have one main product with the colour as a configurable drop down. (rather than one product page for each and therefore duplicated content.)

However on the cateogory page, I want all the possible colors showing in small thumbnails like on http://www.rugsusa.com/rugsusa/control/style-search/~cid=7070

Is there away I can send a link to the same page and then have javascript know what color link was clicked without having antother /color/product.html or ?color=color ?, or anyway that wont be class a duplicated content by google.

Im using Magento and php by the way if that helps.

Thanks in advance, James

[james1892]

I have come to the conclusion that my best bet is to use hash so product.html#color=red or poduct.html#red

Just incase anybody wants the same question answering in the future.

[negative_zero]

If you use canonicalization on your pages you won't have to worry about duplicates so much anyway.