Photo Gallery with Duplicate Content and Titles

[NeilBelliveau]

I have a photo Gallery that is coming up as a lot of Duplicate Titles and Page Content and fixing each photo just isn't possible right now. Should I just block the search engines from indexing them to resolve the errors?

[yeagerd]

One option you may consider so that at least you can have one page found from the gallery is to add a rel=conanical tag to their headers designating one of them as the page to index.

If you are willing to block all of the pages then your better option is to leave them as is.  Duplicate content on your site does not black flag you at Google or make non duplicate pages rank worse.

All it does is this:

Content page has an example Authority of 50.  If it is the sole page with that content then all 50 points go to that page.

However, if you have 5 pages with that content, then each of them shares the seo goodness and have 10 points each.

Now when the SERP is built your 50 points that would have maybe got a first page rank is only valued at 10 so it falls much further back.  Still higher than noindex tagging will get though.  

Hope that helps.

[NeilBelliveau]

Thanks for the great response! I'll leave it as is as you suggested.

[Dr-Pete]

I have to disagree a bit regarding the risks. In general, the main problem is dilution - you're spreading the authority across more pages (as David said). Unfortunately, though, there are worse possibilities - including filtering (Google won't let certain pages rank, or lets the wrong page rank) and even Panda-scale penalties that could impact the broader site. The risks of duplicate content are a lot higher than they were even 3-4 years ago.

It depends a lot on scope, and there's always a trade-off. If you use rel=canonical or NOINDEX the photo pages, then they won't be eligible for ranking. On the other hand, if you spin out hundreds of photo pages, it could negatively impact your overall ranking ability, even for other pages.

If you're talking about a few photo pages here and there, I wouldn't worry about it. If your site has a 500-page index, and 400 of those are photo gallery pages (or something equally extreme), then I'd definitely be proactive. In most cases, I think using rel=canonical from the individual photos back up to the gallery is a solid solution, but it does depend a bit on the site.