Duplicate content

[socrateskirtsios]

I have just read http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world and I would like to know which option is the best fit for my case. I have the website http://www.hotelelgreco.gr and every image in image library http://www.hotelelgreco.gr/image-library.aspx has a different url but is considered duplicate with others of the library. Please suggest me what should i do.

[ResslerMotors]

Are you currently using Canonicals?

[socrateskirtsios]

No i am not using. I would like to know which method to eliminate duplicate should I choose.

For instance, should I canonicalize http://www.hotelelgreco.gr/image-library/mediaLibrary_Results.aspx?photo=1496 to  http://www.hotelelgreco.gr/image-library.aspx???

[Dr-Pete]

If there are links (from external sites) to these images/pages, I'd probably use the canonical tag (to the library, as you said). It's not technically a true duplicate, but that would preserve the link-juice. If there are no links, you could just META NOINDEX them.

I'll add this, though, in your case. Are these the only images (I count 21 of them)? Technically, they're near duplicates, in the sense that they have the same TITLE tags, etc., but if you're talking 2-dozen pages,  I wouldn't lose sleep over it. That scale of duplication isn't likely to cause you much trouble.

[MyClassicGarage]

What if you have this exact same problem, but the scale is quite large?

For example, when you click on any thumbnail image on this page... http://marketplace.myclassicgarage.com/cars/all/Chevrolet-Corvette-Sting-Ray/52048

it pulls up a new url with duplicate text, title tag, and meta description.  The only thing that changes is the image.

This is just one car.  This issue is generating thousands of duplicate content errors on my crawl report.

I am currently in an internal debate over this issue.  The developer is saying that if we use a canonical then none of these high res images will get indexed for image searches.  I'm saying that this creates a tremendous amount of links on each product page that taxes spiders with nothing but duplicate content and prevents them from perhaps crawling as deeply as they otherwise would.

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, you're both right - using canonical on these could hurt your image search rankings and will remove the individual pages from ranking contention, but at this scale of duplication, indexing all of these is diluting your ranking ability. You could even run into Panda-scale problems or cause enough crawler fatigue that more important pages don't get crawled and indexed.

I'd probably lean toward using canonical tags in this case - the ranking ability of your core pages is more important, in most cases, then the ranking ability of the images. This is especially true with Google's new cached image search, where end-users don't even land on your site (they just view the image directly on Google).

The other option would be some kind of approach that loads the new pictures in the window but doesn't change the URL. That could make the images themselves crawlable but keep them all on one page. There are a few ways to do this, but they take some engineering.