Shopping Cart and Duplicate Content

[Monkey SEO]

Our web team just created a site with a shopping cart that we will be doing SEO/marketing for.

The site sells health products. Some of the products appear in several categories. Say "Aloe-Papaya Drink" is the product and it appears in "Anti-aging", "Women's Health" and "Digestive Support" categories. The shopping cart uses bread crumbs to let the user know where they are. So the only difference in the content is the breadcrumb text.

I'm not all that concerned about the duplicate content being an issue in the search engines. I've read recently where Vanessa Fox said that Google will just pick one page and you won't get banned or penalized.

My concern is that if 15 people are out there linking to their "Aloe-Papaya Drink".
5 link to: site.com/productcart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=29&idproduct=10
5 link to: site.com/productcart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=28&idproduct=10
5 link to: site.com/productcart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=27&idproduct=10

(note difference in URL being the category #)

So, any link juice we would be getting will be divided among the pages instead of 15 links to that product.

Apparently there is no way to have the product show up in different categories without the different URLs because of the breadcrumbs. The design/dev team think that the breadcrumbs are more important than keeping with one URL. We haven't run it by the client yet.

I am hoping to find some solid advice here.

What's better for both usability AND SEO - breadcrumb navigation and duplicate content or loose the breadcrumbs and use one URL?

[SemAdvance]

Lose the bread crumbs and use one URL.

Duplicate content is never a good thing in the search engines view of things.

[hostBrain]

The answer is simple...
Put the product in one section and one page.

Without seeing the site... seems that product doesn't belong in either of those categories
I would imagine "juices" "drinks" "beverages"

What you can do is ... on the categories that are related to this product, put the product on these pages, but displayed as "special product" "related product" or "you might also like"
then just hotlink it to where it actually resides in the primary category