Google and Secondary Category Pages.

Let's say I have a site with a kinds of widgets. I categorize all the 100 widgets I have by color.

So I have the 100 widgets spread out into 13 pages of colors (orange, blue, red, green, etc.). I'm ranking pretty good on those pages. The 13 pages are all in the same directory (/colors) and have anywhere from 6 - 11 links to widgets on them.

Now I figure out another way to categorize the widgets by age (2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, etc). If I add another 10 secondary pages that categorize those same widgets and point to the same widgets just from a different directory (/year), will it greatly dilute the rankings of the pages categorized by color?

 

Yes, it will.
You can avoid it by telling robots to not index those secondary categories.

 

Thanks for dropping me some knowledge. It makes sense. Thanks again.