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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

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?

Thanks Rob! That helps a lot. I've been considering beefing up copy content on some of the pages (especially the gallery pages). This kind of gives me a direction to move towards. Devaluing was probably a bad word to use. I mainly just wanted the better content pushed forward without having to actually delete anything. Thanks for the help and also the kind comments on the photography!

Mickey

Hi all, I'm new to Moz, but hoping to learn a lot from it in hopes of growing my business. I have a pretty specific question and hope to get some feedback on how to proceed with some changes to my website. First off, I'm a landscape and travel photographer. My website is at http://www.mickeyshannon.com - you can see that the navigation quickly spreads out to different photo galleries based on location. So if a user was looking for photos from California, they would find galleries for Lake Tahoe, Big Sur, the Redwoods and San Francisco. At this point, there are probably 600-800 photos on my website. At last half of these are either older or just not quite up to par with the quality I'm starting to feel like I should produce. I've been contemplating dumbing down the galleries, and not having it break down so far. So instead of four sub-galleries of California, there would just be one California gallery. In some cases, where there are lots of good images in a location, I would probably keep the sub-galleries, but only if there were dozens of images to work with. In the description of each photo, the exact location is already mentioned, so I'm not sure there's a huge need for these sub-galleries except where there's still tons of good photos to work with.

I've been contemplating building a sort of search archive. Where the best of my photos would live in the main galleries, and if a user didn't find what they were looking for, they could go and search the archives for older photos. That way they're still around for licensing purposes, etc. while the best of the best are pushed to the front for those buying fine art prints, etc. These pages for these search archives would probably need to be de-valued somehow, so that the main galleries would be more important SEO-wise. So for the California galleries, four sub-galleries of perhaps 10 images each would become one main California gallery with perhaps 15 images. The other 25 images would be thrown in the search archive and could be searched by keyword.

The question I have - does this sound like a good plan, or will I really be killing my site when it comes to SEO by making such a large change? My end goal would be to push my better content to the front, while scaling back a lot of the excess. Hopefully I explained this question well. If not, I can try to elaborate further!

Thanks,

Mickey