How can I present multiple pages with similar content (mostly images) without Google penalizing me?

Question

I have a website that presents Q&As to mathematical problems, mostly for pupils aged approx. 16-18 years old. Due to the difficulties of presenting formulas on webpages, the Q&As (formulas) are presented as images. At the moment, each webpage contains one Q&A, and there are many questions and answers. Thus, with little in the way of text, every page looks almost identical. Therefore, Google might very easily see this as duplicate content. What is my best solution to this problem? Should I try put the Q&As in a database and present each different one on the same page (dynamically). Or should I keep things the way they are and prevent Google from seeing most of the Q&As? It is also difficult to make different titles, descriptions etc. as, for each topic, only the question number changes.

Many thanks for your time.

Answer 1

You said it: you can hide the QandA file/directory in the robots.txt file of your web server.

Disallow: /QAfolder

or

Disallow: /Q1.htm
Disallow: /Q2.htm
Disallow: /Q3.htm

or whatnot.

Normally, this would be a bad thing (preventing users from searching for question content) but as you said, they're images anyway.

Answer 2

You're basically a ghost to google anyways if there is no text on each page. If you are worried about SEO you need to worry about text.

You should at the very least look into tagging the formulas or creating a title for the question which is relevant and putting that into a header tag above the question image.

Otherwise no one will find you by that content and that's what it's all about.

Answer 3

Create descriptive useful page titles and meta descriptions.

Create textual representations of what is in the image using alt tags.

Use Different headers.

This could be a little hard to think about as in your context. but, you may be able probably use the question type description or name of the chapter its taken from. basically a text description relevant to the question.

One more thing you can do is. If you have empty space on your page, you can put in some text that describes your website and at the same time uses the right keywords(that you are targeting) in the right percentages Higher up in the page - You may writeup 2-3 different descriptions and alternate them between pages, i.e. if your design permits you.