Creating a site search engine while keeping SEO factors in mind

[msphotography]

I run and own my own travel photography business. (www.mickeyshannon.com) I've been looking into building a search archive of photos that don't necessarily need to be in the main galleries, as a lot of older photos are starting to really clutter up and take away the emphasis from the better work. However, I still want to keep these older photos around. My plan is to simplify my galleries, and pull out 50-75% of the lesser/older photos. All of these photos will still be reachable by a custom-build simple search engine that I'm building to house all these older photos. The photos will be searchable based on keywords that I attach to each photo as I add them to my website.

The question I have is whether this will harm me for having duplicate content? Some of the keywords that would be used in the search archive would be similar or the same to the main gallery names. However, I'm also really trying to push my newer and better images out there to the front. I've read some articles that talk about noindexing search keyword results, but that would make it really difficult for search engines to even find the older photos, as searching for their keywords would be the only way to find them. Any thoughts on a way to work this out that benefits, or at least doesn't hurt me, SEO-wise?

[MattRoney]

Hi there! My immediate thought is that search engine crawlers will have a tough time finding those old photos, anyway, if the only way to reach them is through your custom search. Crawlers don't run searches.

Will those images be on your sitemap?

[msphotography]

Yes, they would be.

However, with the custom search, it would be set up so that the user could either search or they could click a keyword from a list of all the popular keywords that the search archive uses (California, Colorado, Grand Canyon, Lake Tahoe, blue, red, autumn, summer, etc.). While I would leave the pages for the actual photos in the sitemap, I figured I would leave these keyword search pages out of the sitemap, as they would be the most likely to conflict with my main galleries. Does that sounds like a good idea or am I flawed in my thinking here?

Thanks for the help!

Mickey