Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How Many Images on 1 Page Are Acceptable
-
Example I have a page with a slideshow of 35 pictures. They are all unique pictures and relevant to the page, have unique alt text, though no captions or description surrounding the images. Page also has a lot of unique written content.
Question: is this large nr of pictures potentially overwhelming for search engines and they may think it is spammy and it would be a safer bet to only keep the top 10 pictures on such page?
I did review this great whiteboard Friday - http://moz.com/blog/image-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday - and I noticed this at very end: "The other part, and I see this happen a lot especially with bigger clients, is when you put lots and lots of images on one page, like an image gallery, those pages tend to be very hard to get indexed. The reason for that is there's not a lot unique textual content. A lot of times it's just overwhelming to users. It doesn't provide a lot of benefit in a search result."
My page has been indexed, but will ranking potentially be hurt and to play it safe I better reduce nr of pictures? I do understand the "do what is best for the user" scenario and that is what I am doing with a lot of amazing original pictures not found on any other website. However, with search engines we obviously have to consider how they operate as well.
Thank you
-
I have been using plain text to caption my images.. .but the page that you shared looks like a better idea. It communicates that you are writing about an image.
I have not used that coding but I think it would work well. Perhaps better than what I use.
Thanks!
-
last 1: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_figcaption.asp - would that be OK HTMP cap style to use?
-
OK. So whether I use wordpress or HTML style captions does not matter. My web developers had set up wordpress stye and I was advised HTML captions may be better. I will leave as is then. thx again. These have been very clear and quality answers
-
I have image captions that are typed as text into Wordpress. I have image captions that have been created as HTML in Dreamweaver. Both of these work fine.
On many of my pages I have a gray caption box beneath each image and a colored title box above each image. The color in the title box is taken from the image so that it looks nice. Just make a CSS style to format the title and caption box.
-
this is great answer and you back it up with experiences you have seen.
Question: should this be HTML captions or can it be written text in wordpress below image? What kind of text works best for SEO?
-
Pages with lots of images can be great assets for your website. I have pages with 40 to 50 to 100 images (nice size images) that rank at the top of Google for really really difficult queries - and in my opinion the images are the reason why these pages rank so well. People love visual content - especially if it is beautiful, interesting, surprising, funny, etc (long list of other reasons).
"The other part, and I see this happen a lot especially with bigger clients, is when you put lots and lots of images on one page, like an image gallery, those pages tend to be very hard to get indexed. The reason for that is there's not a lot unique textual content. A lot of times it's just overwhelming to users. It doesn't provide a lot of benefit in a search result."
heh... my response to this is... Get off of your butt and write some captions. If you have created all of those awesome images you must know something about them. They say an image is worth a thousand words. Get busy. If visitors see a great image they want to know.... Who? Where? How? WTF? Should be really easy for you to write that.
I have some pages where I have spent $1000 to $2000 just to create the images. Some are graphics, some are photos, some are graphs based upon data. Images are my best content and my competitive advantage. I spend thousands of dollars a month to create and acquire some of the best images in my industry.
It sounds like you have a lot of great images and are sitting on a fantastic opportunity. Write about your images and see what happens. You might be surprised at what happens.
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
-
Merging Pages and SEO
Hi, We are redesigning our website the following way: Before: Page A with Content A, Page B with Content B, Page C with Content C, etc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading1
e.g. one page for each Customer Returns, Overstocks, Master Case, etc
Now: Page D with content A + B + C etc.
e.g. one long page containing all Product Conditions, one after the other So we are merging multiples pages into one.
What is the best way to do so, so we don't lose traffic? (or we lose the minimum possible) e.g. should we 301 Redirect A/B/C to D...?
Is it likely that we lose significant traffic with this change? Thank you,0 -
If Robots.txt have blocked an Image (Image URL) but the other page which can be indexed has this image, how is the image treated?
Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika11 -
Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?
Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making :  changed to 
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam-P0 -
Is it a problem to use a 301 redirect to a 404 error page, instead of serving directly a 404 page?
We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page, So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404? Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).0 -
Can too many "noindex" pages compared to "index" pages be a problem?
Hello, I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages. Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow". At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages. Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter? Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome. Thank you! Fabrizio
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Is it allowed to have different alt on same image on different pages?
Hi, I have images that match several different keywords and I wondered if I can give them different alts based on the page that they are displayed or will Google be angry with me? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
What is an acceptable bounce rate?
0% is of course the best case and 100% would be the worst case but what would is considered average. How do you address this subject with your clients?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jjgonza0