Thin Content due to Photo Galleries
-
Hi folks,
i've got a question: we have about 3 million image sites with unique URL on our site. All images with a caption are transmitted to Google index, which regards 2/3 of all images.
We are afraid that this could cause some problems due to thin content.
Please take a look at one of our article sites with such a photo gallery: http://goo.gl/hq6bxG
All gallery pics with a caption are indexed: http://goo.gl/gd9TQ6
Do you have any advices how to handle those photo galleries? How should they be flaged for Google? Every pic "noindex" and "canonical"-Tag to the article?
Thx a lot!
Matthias
-
Hi. I wouldn't use "noindex", so images are actually getting into Google's image search etc, but canonical sounds fine.
-
Dear Dimitrii,
thanks for your answer.
We considered your recommended action to create a slider gallery. but as we are looking for a short term solution this is not an option now (we are planning this anyway in the near future).
Can't we optimize our galleries if we take all image sites out of index and set an canonical-tag to the article as show above? Or do you have any advice how to tag our image sites for Google without changing our site structure - for example images with unique caption stay in the index and images without caption are removed out of index?
Thx a lot!
Matthias
-
Hi Matthias,
I agree that the content is pretty thin and that it would probably be better to present them in a slider (check the example from Autobild http://www.autobild.de/bilder/mazda-mx-5-gegen-bw-z4-6937517.html#bild23). While the presentation is quite similar to your presentation - the source contains all the captions & all the images making the content much richer.
From a usability perspective: each image requires the page to reload completely which is not really great.
I imagine that changing the images from separate url's to a slider can be an enormous amount of work. Having thin content / semi duplicate content on your site is not necessarily a cause for punishment (unless with clear malicious intent) - the issue is mainly that these thin pages will not show up in search results. If you are not optimising for image search (which I assume based on the captions you put under the pictures) you could just as well leave them as it (your normal articles look ok on first sight so you have more than just thin content pages).
If you would optimise for images, you should make your captions a little bit more descriptive & longer and you definitely need to change you alt titles (looks too much like keyword stuffing) - you might check this WBF - it's old but not much has changed on Image Search since then (well - at least in Germany as you are still using the "old" type of image search)
rgds,
Dirk
-
Guten morgen, mein freund.
Well, I have questions about your website's structure, which, indeed, can answer your questions. So, what I see is that there is a page with a link to the gallery without any content. Each of the gallery's images is separate page without any content. Of course it's going to be thin content! Is there a reason the website has been structured this way?
What I recommend is either add content, not just caption, to every image of gallery if you wanna keep the way it's structured now, or rebuild website architecture. I'd do it this way:
Page with slider/gallery with description of the gallery, images are not separate pages, but kinda like a carousel or something. Make sure that all images in the same carousel are united by the same subject/event and each image has it's own unique caption. This way you'll combine the same gallery related pages into one, and this page will be not thin, that's for sure.
Hope this helps.
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
-
Sitemap For Static Content And Blog
We'll be uploading a sitemap to google search console for a new site. We have ~70-80 static pages that don't really chance much (some may change as we modify a couple pages over the course of the year). But we have a separate blog on the site which we will be adding content to frequently. How can I set up the sitemap to make sure that "future" blog posts will get picked up and indexed. I used a sitemap generator and it picked up the first blog post that's on the site, but am wondering what happens with future ones? I don't want to resubmit a new sitemap each time that has a link to a new blog post we posted.
Technical SEO | | vikasnwu0 -
Purchasing duplicate content
Morning all, I have a client who is planning to expand their product range (online dictionary sites) to new markets and are considering the acquisition of data sets from low ranked competitors to supplement their own original data. They are quite large content sets and would mean a very high percentage of the site (hosted on a new sub domain) would be made up of duplicate content. Just to clarify, the competitor's content would stay online as well. I need to lay out the pros and cons of taking this approach so that they can move forward knowing the full facts. As I see it, this approach would mean forgoing ranking for most of the site and would need a heavy dose of original content as well as supplementing the data on page to build around the data. My main concern would be that launching with this level of duplicate data would end up damaging the authority of the site and subsequently the overall domain. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
Technical SEO | | BackPack851 -
Duplicate Page Content Issue
Hello, I recently solved www / no www duplicate issue for my website, but now I am in trouble with duplicate content again. This time something that I cannot understand happens: In Crawl Issues Report, I received Duplicate Page Content for http://yourappliancerepairla.com (DA 19) http://yourappliancerepairla.com/index.html (DA 1) Could you please help me figure out what is happenning here? By default, index.html is being loaded, but this is the only index.html I have in the folder. And it looks like the crawler sees two different pages with different DA... What should I do to handle this issue?
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Not ranking - Scarped content
Hi, I have a problem with a website, that never compe up with before. The website is: https://www.enallaktikidrasi.com It has a bunch of excellent articles, good enough on-page SEO and a medium backlink profile. However, it is ranking just for very very few keywords. The major problem is that there are original articles that searched by their title won't appear in top100 results but they will appear in other websites that scapre them (even if they give a backlink to our original article!) Also, the website has good rankings in Bing and Yahoo but not in Google. There are keywords ranking in #1 in Bing but nowhere in top10 pages in Google.... I am guessing for 3 issues: 1. Majestic shows a very low trust score (just 13). However, the website has not got any kind of penalty in the last 3 years. 2. There are many scarpers. The odd is that scarpers with no real value outrank our content. (Scarpers with almost zero backlink profile) 3. We ran Sucuri on website as there were a large bots attack. Is there a correlation between it bots attack and Google results? (but why not in Bing and Yahoo too?) It seems like Google underestimates the website when indexing websites for some reason. Moreover, some of the articles are really the best around but the keywords they are targeted are not either within the 30 first pages... Any help?? Thanks..
Technical SEO | | alex33andros0 -
Content is king, is it okay if its in a widget?
My home page for my site, isn't really a home page, not sure how to describe that. We have additional pages that are stand alone pages which we work on and add content too, just not for the main page. So I have put my 300 words in a widget on the front page (which actually shows up on all the page being a widget. Is that good for SEO, or should it be in the body of a page? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Does turning website content into PDFs for document sharing sites cause duplicate content?
Website content is 9 tutorials published to unique urls with a contents page linking to each lesson. If I make a PDF version for distribution of document sharing websites, will it create a duplicate content issue? The objective is to get a half decent link, traffic to supplementary opt-in downloads.
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
Are recipes excluded from duplicate content?
Does anyone know how recipes are treated by search engines? For example, I know press releases are expected to have lots of duplicates out there so they aren't penalized. Does anyone know if recipes are treated the same way. For example, if you Google "three cheese beef pasta shells" you get the first two results with identical content.
Technical SEO | | RiseSEO0 -
Can double content be a reason to not have PR?
In a bigger project are several domains that show the same content like the main-site (there is a reason to have it like that). Now those "double-content domains" are indexed and ranking in Google. But now I see that all those double-content domains have no pagerank visible, despite they do all have their unique own backlinks. Do you know why those domains don't show Pagerank? Can it really have something to do with the double-content situation?
Technical SEO | | kenbrother0