What is the best way to eliminate this specific image low lying content?

[williammarlow]

The site in question is www.homeanddesign.com where we are working on recovering from some big traffic loss.

I finally have gotten the sites articles properly meta titled and descriptioned now I'm working on removing low lying content.

The way there CMS is built, images have their own page (every one that's clickable).  So this leads to a lot of thin content that I think needs to be removed from the index.  Here is an example:

http://www.homeanddesign.com/photodisplay.asp?id=3633

I'm considering the best way to remove it from the index but not disturb how users enjoy the site.

What are my options?  Here is what I'm thinking:

1. add Disallow: /photodisplay to the robots.txt file

2. See if there is a way to make a lightbox instead of a whole new page for images.  But this still leaves me with 100s of pages with just an image on there with backlinks, etc.

3. Add noindex tag to the photodisplay pages

[Everett]

Disallow: /photodisplay.asp?*

That should do it. But just to be safe you can add another one for:

Disallow: /photodisplay.asp

There is very, very, very, very little danger of you blocking your entire site from being crawled if you add those disallow statements to your robots.txt file. If you're an SEO your job is to "mess with" the robots.txt file. Furthermore, trying to dynamically change the robots meta tag to noindex based on page-type is going to be much more tricky and potentially dangerous than adding a line to the robots.txt file.

Don't forget to remove the pages from the index using the URL removal tool in GWT once the block has been added.

Also I'd stop linking to those pages. It is best practice not to link to pages that you don't want indexed if you can help it. I'd go the lightbox route you mentioned above. This is something I do on my Wordpress sites too.

Good luck!

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi WIlliam,

I would personally go the route of adding the noindex tag to the photo pages. Messing with the robots.txt file would probably be quicker; however, I am a little hesitant about messing with the robots.txt tag if I don't have to... one slip and you could be blocking your whole site or an entire directory from being crawled vs specifically calling out each individual page using the noindex tag.

Lightboxes are fine, but like you say, you aren't really solving the problem of tons of other pages.

You could look into your CMS and see if there is a way to remove the automatically generated link to photodisplay.aspXXXX so that the images are still displayed with , but it doesn't add the <a href="">... you know?</a>

<a href="">Hope this helps.

Mike</a>