Question

I have some codeigniter gallery app with my own search engine etc.

On the single item page there are next and previous buttons to navigate between images.

My image url looks like:

myurl.com/image/keyword/res_position

keyword variable is obvious the keyword which user typed for search, and res_position is the position in results listing – I need it to navigate between next and previous.

Ofc my next item has url

myurl.com/keyword/res_position+1 

and previous

myurl.com/keyword/res_position-1  

That’s it. Works like a charm.

My problem is that I want to have some method that could be used only to show single image. I thought about

mysite.com/image/id 

and that will do the job – but I’m worried about duplicate content and SEO aspect.

As you can see, my “next-previous” URL structure has a lot of variations, because user can type a lot of other keywords, and single image “res-position” can be a different number every time.

Can you recommend me some soultions for this problem?

Answer 1

Just a thought –

Providing multiple URI’s for the same content is gonna cause duplicate problem but I don’t think you can do much about this. However, you can try disallowing certain URLs from searching engines using robots.txt – this should help you stop duplicate content problem…

User-agent: *
Disallow: /image/something

UPDATE

Robots.txt is also used to avoid what is known as “canonicalization”
problems or having multiple “canonical” URLs. This problem is
sometimes referred to incorrectly as a “duplicate content” problem.

Canonicalization problems occur where multiple pages on a website
contain the same information. For example, a product page might also
have a “Print” version to make it easier to print out the specs and
details on the product. This can pose a problem to search engines who
then have to figure out which version of the page (i.e.
site.com/product-a.html or site.com/product-a-print.html) is the
canonical one. Robots.txt would be used to keep the secondary
version(s) from being indexed.

Reference : http://seoroi.com/seo-faq/robotstxt-what-it-is-why-its-used-and-how-to-write-it/