Tips for Panda-Proofing an Image Gallery

[Peter264]

I'm currently working on a website that has a video, image and media gallery with over 9,000 items.

The gallery can be found here:
http://flyawaysimulation.com/images/16/microsoft-flight-simulator-x/

Every image has a page of its own.  Therefore, essentially 9,000 pages of very thin content, especially the image pages with no UGC comments.

Does anyone here have any tips to "panda-proof" these pages?  The images still need to be indexed.  What can we do here?

The site also hosts videos, which of course the page the video resides on needs to stay in the index too (like youtube).  Example of the video page here:

http://flyawaysimulation.com/images/media/9371/fsps-3d-real-cockpit-effect-for-fsx/

Really want to hear your thoughts.

Thanks in advance!

[EGOL]

We have not used MTurk.  I think that it would be very hard to find a Turker who would have the background knowledge needed to write accurate content for our site and the writing skills needed to pass my picky requirements.

I can't share URLs but for the image content we just write detailed explainations of the images.  As they say, an image is worth 1000 words.  These articles might expand well beyond the single image and have four, five or six by the time we are finished.

I know that writing 9000 of these would be very time consuming.  Just pick the ones with the highest traffic or the highest traffic potential and start writing articles.  I am writing an article for one of my pages today and probably tomorrow and have hundreds more to write.

[Peter264]

Thank you EGOL for your reply.

You're answer is along the lines of what I was already thinking.  Have you had any experience with MTurk for getting this content written?

Could you provide me an example of one of your 200 word image and 1000 word image pages?  I just want to take a look to see how you've gone about writing relevant copy for an image.

It did cross my mind to NOINDEX these pages, but you're right - investing time in the content would be much more valuable in the long run - it's just that there are over 9,000 pages to get this content written for!

Thank you again for your reply.

[EGOL]

I know that this isn't the answer that you want.... but, it is very hard to panda-proof thin content.

I have a website that has lots and lots of images - each on a separate page - that could have very very skimpy page content.  To avoid problems with search engines, we invested a lot to get relevant text onto those pages.

So, here is my advice.

Instead of thinking of this as a "problem".  Think of it as a way to invest in the harvesting of long tail traffic.  When you start adding text to these pages the amount of traffic that they pull from search goes up - often enormously.  And you make some money back.

We have a lot of image pages that originally had 30 words.  When we increased to 200 words the amount of traffic went up nicely, and when some of these have been improved to 1000 word article pages, now their rankings have gone up and their traffic is many times higher than what they pulled in at 30 words.

Pick your best pages for additional content and invest in them.  See what happens.  You might be so surprised that you decide to invest in a lot more pages.