Wordpress photo blog with sparse text - noindex posts, index categories?
-
Hi everyone,
I have a wordpress blog that is heavy on photos but short on text - most of my posts consist of a photo linking to a full gallery, and a short description of 1-4 sentences. I've often read recommendations to noindex category pages, but in this case I'm wondering if it might be best to noindex the individual posts instead - I'm concerned that the short posts might seem like thin content to Google compared to the category pages which aggregate the posts. Also, some of my categories reflect keywords that I'd like to rank well for. I have about a dozen categories and close to 1000 posts.
-
Thanks Peter! Maybe I will give that a try.
-
I tend to agree with Andrew that blocking all 1,000 pages really removes you from a lot of potential ranking opportunities, but two issues come into play:
(1) You may be stuck behind the safe-search wall, which can really diminish the ability of those pages to rank.
(2) The existence of these photos on other sites is definitely going to increase the chances of something like a Panda penalty, or, at the very least, aggressive filtering of that content.
Long-term, I think what Andrew said about making the content richer is critical - you're going to have to provide a clear value-add that Google can see. In the mean-time, it doesn't have to be all-or-none. Maybe instead of opening up all 1,000 photos to ranking you could open up just your most popular category, try to beef up that content, and see how it goes?
-
Np! I asked about the competitiveness aspect b/c it might behoove you to redirect your marketing energies elsewhere, i.e.
- Focus on building followers (i.e. social media) (spread versus rank)
- Syndicate your content beyond your current affiliates (watermarked, ofc) on other sites to drive traffic that way
- Make an special effort to make your content "thicker" to see if the rise in rankings is worth the increase in writing time
Without knowing the ins' and outs' of your work, those would be two of my guesses. I wouldn't be surprised if there is social media specifically friendly to your niche.
P.S. Yikes on the traffic!
-
Thanks Andrew!
I guess I will leave indexing as is for now (indexed categories, posts, and pages; noindexed archives).
The competitiveness of the keywords I'm interested in range from moderate to high. I should mention it is an adult-oriented site in a particular niche (outdoor nude photography). I formerly ranked well in many of the keywords before Panda came out. Over the course of a couple years I went from ~3500 daily visitors from Google to < 500 (analytics screenshot attached). My objective is to generate enough affiliate sales to make a small profit, or at minimum break even with hosting costs - this is just a hobby for me, I have been running the site since ~1999. I alt-text the photos. But most of the images are provided by the affiliates so maybe that is the real problem - too many other sites have the same images. However I give them my own unique alt text and rename the image files to be more descriptive.
-Matt
-
Hey Matt —
I have a couple of questions:
- How competitive are the keywords you're interested in winning? (Are these battles you can reasonably win?)
- What's your objective for ranking? Blog followers? Converting for leads? (SEO is largely text-based; are you better off solving your business objectives in other ways?)
- Do you alt-text your photos? (Have you attracting attention via Google image search?)
I doubt that noindexing the posts would help you out—I don't think you're penalized for having pages that are thin on content (they're just less SEO friendly). I would leave them indexed; then also figure out how to beef up your category page design to rank better.
— Andrew
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
-
The particular page cannot be indexed by Google
Hello, Smart People!
On-Page Optimization | | Viktoriia1805
We need help solving the problem with Google indexing.
All pages of our website are crawled and indexed. All pages, including those mentioned, meet Google requirements and can be indexed. However, only this page is still not indexed.
Robots.txt is not blocking it.
We do not have a tag "nofollow"
We have it in the sitemap file.
We have internal links for this page from indexed pages.
We requested indexing many times, and it is still grey.
The page was established one year ago.
We are open to any suggestions or guidance you may have. What else can we do to expedite the indexing process?1 -
Do Blog Tags affect SEO at all anymore?
We're trying to standardize the use of tags on our site amongst writers/editors, and I'm trying to come up a list of tags they can choose from to tag posts with - and telling them to use no more than 10 (absolute maximum) per post. We are also in the process of migrating to a new CMS, and have 8 defined categories that will all have their own landing page within our "News" section. TLDR: Do blog tags have any impact on SEO anymore? Are they solely meant to help users find articles related on popular topics, or does creating a tag for a popular topic help to improve organic visibility? Full Question: With the tag standardization, I want to make sure we're creating the most useful and effective tags; and the UX/SEO sides of my brain are conflicted. To my understanding, creating a tag about a high volume topic in an industry helps establish the website's relevance to Google/other search engines about that topic and improves overall relevance; but the tag feed page (ex: http://freshome.com/tag/home-protection/) isn't really meant for organic search visibility. So my other question is, is it worth it to noindex the tag pages in the robots.txt? Will that affect any benefit to increased relevance for Google (if there is any)? I'm interested to hear others' thoughts and suggestions. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | davidkaralisjr0 -
Redirecting deleted posts 301 vs 302
There is a category on WP where job ads are posted. when a post got deleted I would like to pass 404 error page and redirect all those deleted posts to specific category. I found WP plugin Auto Redirect 404 in 301 for Trashed Posts which does redirect deleted post to specific URL. But posts which are in the trash (not permanently deleted) will get 302 redirects. Those deleted permanently will get 301 redirects. Should I try editing this plugin or find another why? Maybe there is similar way with Redirection plugin?
On-Page Optimization | | OVJ0 -
Help, a certain directory is not being indexed
Before I start, dont expect this to be too easy. This really has me puzzled and am surprised I am still yet to find a solution for it. Get ready. We have a wordpress website, launched over 6 months ago and have never had an issue getting content such as pages and post pages and categories indexed. However, I some what recently (about 2 months ago) installed a directory plugin (Business Directory Plugin) which lists businesses via unique urls that are accesible from a sub folder. Its these business listings that I absolutely cannot get indexed. The index page to the directory which links to the business pages is indexed, however for some reason google is not indexing all the listing pages which are linked to from this page. Its not an issue of the content being uncrawlable or at least dont think so as when I run crawlers on my site such as xml sitemap crawlers it finds all the pages including the directory pages so I am sure its not an issue of the search engines not finding the content. I have created xml sitemaps and uploaded to webmaster tools, tools recongises that there are many pages in the xml sitemap but google continues to only index a small percentage (everything but my business listings). The directory has been there for about 8 weeks now so I know there is a issue as it should of been indexed by now. See our main website at www.smashrepairbid.com.au and the business directory index page at www.smashrepairbid.com.au/our-shops/ To throw in a curve ball, in looking into this issue and setting up tools we noticed a lot of 404 error pages (nearly 4,000). We were very confused where these were coming from as they were only being generated from search engines - humans could not access the 404s and so we are guessing se's were firing some javascript code to generate them or something else weird. We could see the 404s in the logs so we know they were legit but again feel it was only search engines, this was validated when we added some rules to robots.txt and we saw the errors in the logs stop. We put the rules in robots txt file to try and stop google from indexing the 404 pages as we could not find anyway to fix the site / code (no idea what is causing them). If you do a site search in google you will see all the pages that are omitted in the results. Since adding the rules to robots, our impressions shown through tools have jumped right up (increased by 5 times) so thought this was a good indication of improvement but still not getting the results we want. Does anyone have any clue whats going on or why google and other se's are not indexing this content? Any help would be greatly appreciated and if you need any other information to assist just ask me. Really appreciate anyone who can spare their time to help me, I sure do need it. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | ziller0 -
Duplicate Content from WordPress Category Base?
I recently changed my category base in WordPress and instead of redirecting or deleting the old base, WordPress kept the content up. So I now have duplicate content on two different urls - one on the old category base, one on the new category base. How should I handle this situation? The site is only a couple weeks old, if that makes any difference.
On-Page Optimization | | JABacchetta0 -
Wordpress Title Element tag too long?
So apparently when I add the name of the blog within Wordpress, the name of the blog shows up after the the main title of each blog post and page. So trying to keep the title element >70 characters, how does one name the Wordpress blog as mine is/was: Lake Tahoe wedding photographer / Heidi Huber Photography and keep that only on the intro page and leave each page of the blog and the titles of the blog posts to not have "Lake Tahoe wedding photographer added to the end of the Title Element? Anyone have any idea? I also had gone in at one point and updated every single Title on each page/post using Yoast's SEO and the SEOMOZ crawl is still coming up with over 216 caution errors for the title page. Thank you so much for any advice! Heidi
On-Page Optimization | | hmhuber0 -
Wordpress category links not working
Hi All of sudden, my category links are not working. Any tips on figuring out what's causing this? Looks like permalink problem with newer wordpress version. I turned off all the plugins see if this cause any problems. Still not being able to find any option. Here's my site http://www.hibebefetaldoppler.com/fetal-doppler-questions-and-answers/ Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | BistosAmerica0 -
How Can I Get Yahoo to Index My Site?
How Can I Get Yahoo to Index My Site? I have installed Bing webmaster tool two months ago -- is Yahoo that slow. My site has been out since May 2010 and for a year and a half, I only have 40 pages index. HELP!!!!
On-Page Optimization | | AppleCapitalGroup0