Web Developer Using Stock Photos
-
Hello,
The organization is selling a cms system in a niche market across the country. It has the normal SEO challenges, in addition he is using purchased stock images.
This seemed ok, while he was smaller but now we are growing rapidly and these images are VERY STOCK- and well used ( I have checked with Tiny Eye).
I remember a few years ago this was a flag to the search engines who went through manual review, is this still true?
It seems to me that the theme's that come with the images, are duplicated ( including navigation & footers), so having the duplicated images would be another negative.
Thank you for your suggestions!
-
You should be good to go. According to Rand the footers, menus, and sidebar content is ignored. What is seen as unique is only the body section of the page. Here is the link:
Hope this answers your question.
-
Unique, Innovative, Fresh Content is what search engines are looking for. Having stock or generic images isn't necessary bad, but not exactly good. Does that help?
-
I think if the stock image fits your brand then it's ok to use it. To the best of my knowledge the cover of Snow Leopard is actually a stock image, so even the best prefer to trust a professional to photograph a live snow leopard.
But back to your question I would certainly apply the names and alt tags to the business, so I wouldn't just use the most generic of naming conventions. Maybe a photo of happy customers would read "my_brand_testimonials" especially if it is on the testimonials page of your site. I would also make sure the stock is not commonly associated with your industry and that it's not too popular. If it is consider not making an image site map.
Another practice I would use would be if possible to alter the images for your use. Of course this is assuming you have the rights to make those modifications. But simple modifications can go a long way at explaining things. I myself have used skitch to draw attention to certain points.
Things I wouldn't do are to use a stock boardroom and claim it's the office. In this case theres really no stock solution and it looks deceiving.
I've never experienced this in a negative way but I find it hard to believe Google would penalize someone for using stock navigation buttons. I suppose if someone was crafting a directory using a popular directory software and provided little to no SEO value, but was the only player in a razor thin niche, then maybe being completely stock would hurt the site. But one could argue it never stood a chance regardless.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages?
We added hundreds of pages to our website & restructured the layout to include 3 additional locations within the sub-pages, same brand/domain name. The 3 locations old domains were redirected to their sites within our main brand domain. How long could Google take to crawl/index the new pages and rank the keywords used within those pages? And possibly increase our domain authority hopefully? We didn't want our brand spread out over multiple websites/domains on the internet. This also allowed for more content to be written on pages, per each of our locations service's, as well.
Web Design | | BurgSimpson0 -
Which woocommerce product filter plugin should I use?
Hi! I have to choose a premium woocommerce product filter plugin, but I can't make up my mind since there are so many options out there. I tried to compare some of them, but I would like to hear from experts or people who already bought and run one of them on their websites in order to focus on the better one. Is there a particular plugin which stands out from the crowd? Are there product filter plugins you definitely do not recommend buying? What I am looking for is a SEO oriented plugin( some search results by filters like sizes, colors, in stock /out of stock should not be indexed at all while categories should be normally indexed), easy to use (I am not a developer and I have to be able to set up filters by myself easily), compatible with wpml and and, last but not least, the plugin support should be reliable and helpful. I am looking forward to your suggestions. thanks in advance
Web Design | | manunika0 -
My news site not showing in "In the news" list on Google Web Search
I got a news website (www.tapscape.com) which is 6 years old and has been on Google News since 2012. However, whenever I publish a news article, it never shows up "In the news" list on Google Web Search. I have already added the schema.org/NewsArticle on the website and have checked it if it's working or not on Google structured data testing tool. I see everything shows on on the structured data testing tool. The site already has a news sitemap (http://www.tapscape.com/news-sitemap.xml) and has been added to Google webmaster tools. News articles show perfectly fine in the News tab, but why isn't the articles being shown on "In the news" list on the Google web search? My site has a strong backlink background already, so I don't think I need to work on the backlinks. Please let me know what I'm doing wrong, and how can I get it to the news articles on "In the news" list. Below is a screenshot that I have attached to this question to help you understand what I mean to say. 1qoArRs
Web Design | | hakhan2010 -
Does stock art photo attribution negatively impact SEO by leaking Google Page Rank?
Greetings: Companies such as Shutterstock often require that buyers place credit attribution on their web pages when photos you buy from them appear on these pages.. Shutterstock requests that credit attribution links such as these be added: Songquan Deng / Shutterstock.com Do these links negatively impact SEO? Or do search engines view them as a positive? Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Using content from other sites without duplicate content penalties?
Hi there, I am setting up a website, where i believe it would substantially benefit users experience if i setup a database of information on artists. I am torn because to feasibly do this correctly, i would have content that is built from multiple sources, but has no real unique content. It would have parts from Wikipedia, parts from other websites etc. All would be sourced of-course. My concern is that if i do this, am i risking in devaluing my website because of this. Is there a way i can handle this without taking a hit?
Web Design | | BorisD0 -
Using H1 Headings - More than 1?
I've known about avoiding the use of more than 1 H1 Heading Tags, however, with HTML5 is this going to change... at least that's how I understand it. According to HTML5 Specs, Each 'section' can have an H1 heading, which at least theoretically means certain web pages that have multiple "sectioning elements" can have more than 1 H1 heading... true? False? What I'm looking for here is some insight into the ramifications HTML5 will have on the use of H1 tags. And would like to know how search engines currently handle this and are they anticipated to change as the HTML5 outline algorithm becomes widely supported? thanks in advance Kelly
Web Design | | KellysTutorials0 -
Looking for quality, cheap web design company recommendations
Does anyone have any recommendations of a very cheap web design company from India or other countries where the work is also high quality? I can project manage the development and provide a set of web standards such as to use valid code, no meta keyword tags, no flash, etc etc. I am looking for companies I can trust to perform the actual work. The web is full of companies but examples of quality work with WordPress, Joomla and particular ecommerce platforms is very thin or non-existent. If you can share any companies which you have personal experience with, I would appreciate it.
Web Design | | RyanKent0