How Close Is Too Close? (PHP "Duplicate" Pages)

[andertoons]

My site has thousands of images categorized into a dozen or so main topics.

Often images fall into more than one topic. For example, this cartoon falls into "office", "sales" and "business" leading to multiple URLs as such:

http://www.andertoons.com/toon.php?id=5030&topic=Office

http://www.andertoons.com/toon.php?id=5030&topic=Sales

http://www.andertoons.com/toon.php?i...topic=Business

On the surface it seems obvious that these are 'duplicate' pages, except that they're not enitrely.

At the bottom of each page there are three suggested images that vary every time you refresh the page. So each URL will be varying slightly from the others in this way.

Do you think Google could be penalizing me for duplication here?

Would it help if I created only one page for each cartoon and eliminate the "=topic" at the end of the URLs?

[bhartzer]

If the only thing that's different between those pages I'm sure that they're going to be considered to be duplicates--I don't even have to look at the pages to tell you that.

If you can change the URLs, that's definitely preferred. There are other things that you can do to make sure that they're not duplicates, which is to add more content to the pages. You could use RSS or other text--even related links--to change the pages.

[Duncan Pollock]

No one knows the basis that Google has for deciding duplicate content. However, it's probably something to do with how much similarity exists in two pages, even if they have their own (slightly different in your case) URLs.
Given this, what strikes me as bring wrong/risky is your use of the same Idea cartoon on the three pages. It could be wiser perhaps to make each one a blown up version of one that's drawn from your obviously extensive collection of cartoons on the specific topic.

Duncan

[brian.mark]

It won't exactly get you a penalty for having duplicate content, but it will only show one result or the other, it filters out whichever is less relevant (usually the lower PR of the 3).

We've made mistakes like that before as well, but it doesn't kill your rankings. If you get all of the pages linking to the same one, that'll make it more important and it should climb at least somewhat in the SERPs.

Brian.

[realestate4sale]

I have read many places that if you change the content 10% - 20% you are fine. Personally I change any page that might be dup content 30% to be safe. Change the links, colors, font, meta tags, and use a thesarus to change the copy.

[tcampione]

I don't believe that G will penalize a site for having 1 or 2 duplicates of pages within its own domain. Multiple duplicates across domains will eventually result in all but one ranking well, of course.

If anything, your pages will probably not rank well on their own because of a lack of content though.

[Duncan Pollock]

tcampione has a good point about limited content. I realize that your emphasis is necessarily on the cartoons themselves, but perhaps you could/should add some sales talk about how you think them up, how people can and do make use of them, how often you create new ones, how many in total are available, and this sort of thing.
To not quite use the correct phrasing: I'm willing to bet that as far as the spiders are concerned, one cartoon is not worth a thousand words.

Duncan

[andertoons]

First off, thanks to everyone for your advice so far! I've got some major improvements beginning next week, and some good inspiration for somemore changes.

I know these individual cartoon pages don't have a lot of content, but I have fleshed out the front of the site quite a bit and that's where my SEO comesmore into play. Here are a few examples (FYI, we are changing hosting as we speak, so don't get rattled if the site's missing for a bit):

http://www.andertoons.com/business_cartoons.php
http://www.andertoons.com/family_cartoons.php

I've considered adding more content to the individual cartoons' pages like the caption in actual text and an ID#. I've also considered a list of keywords associated with the cartoons (from my database), but I thought the list of keywords might seem too spammy.

I'd also run a blog on the site recently, but I found it difficult to keep cramming it full of keywords and be happy with it creatively. So, as not to dillute the rest of the site, I moved it to a Typepad location instead.

Any other ideas for a boost?