Do gallery images constitute "substantially duplicate content"?

Trying to get an exact definition/set of policies

[loudspeaker]

On my site, I have quite a few photos (in the 100's). They are organized in galleries and one photo may belong in 1,2,3, or even 4 or 5 of them. For each photo, there's the picture itself + a short explanation of what it is.

A while back, I asked my programmer to implement the "gallery" functionality by giving the users "previous/next" buttons. What he did was this: he created SEVERAL PAGES for each "instance" of a photo in each gallery: thus, PHOTO1 may appear as PHOTO1_GALLERYA, PHOTO1_GALLERYB, and so on... This allows us to have next/previous buttons as we now know which gallery the user is browsing and can jump to the right photo in the same gallery.

My question: does this run against Google's policies in any way? Technically, I do have several instances of each photo page (with the same content, but different links to "previous" and "next" photos). But I'm doing it to help the user, not my search rankings. Am I guilty of the "duplicate content" violation?

Any thoughts?

[ken_b]

Yeah, I would think that might be a problem down the line.

[g1smd]

Yes, it is duplicate content, in exactly the same way that the "next" and "previous" links in a Vbulletin or PHPbb formum generate multiple URLs for the same piece of content.

Avoid doing it that way.

[Oliver Henniges]

I'd support that. Let me also add, that a great chance lies in defining the alt-tags of the photos, and you may also add a long-desc-tag. Even if you don't expect blind people to visit your galleries, I think these accessibility-issues may still give you a 'plus' in SE-rankings.

[europeforvisitors]

I'd be cautious with the alt text, though. For users with screen readers, "photo" or "image" is a lot less annoying than a string of keywords.

[loudspeaker]

Thank you very much for your responses! Assuming you are right, I must say I am a little disappointed in how Google forces seemingly arbitrary rules on us....

Anyway, what do you think about this workaround - what if I made my photos look like CGI calls:

/photo_123.html?gallery=a
/photo_123.html?gallery=b
/photo_123.html?gallery=b

(in this case photo "123" is placed in three different galleries). Obviously the three pages would be the same except for the "next photo/previous photo" navigation links.

Would Google then "forgive" me for using the same photo with three-four different CGI parameters?

[daveVk]

Still duplicate content, three urls to basicly the same page, the fact that they differ after the? makes no difference. Consider making the gallary a cookie value and use javascipt to do the correct thing on prior/next, unsure there is other navigation for google to find all pages.

[loudspeaker]

Thanks, Dave! I'll look into the cookie option. Haven't thought of that.

[g1smd]

URLs that are different after a # are considered by Google to be the same, because all after the # is ignored.

Maybe your scripting can take that into account in some way.

www.domain.com/gallery.php?photo=1020#galleryA