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
-
Correct robots.txt for WordPress
Hi. So I recently launched a website on WordPress (1 main page and 5 internal pages). The main page got indexed right off the bat, while other pages seem to be blocked by robots.txt. Would you please look at my robots file and tell me what‘s wrong? I wanted to block the contact page, plugin elements, users’ comments (I got a discussion space on every page of my website) and website search section (to prevent duplicate pages from appearing in google search results). Looks like one of the lines is blocking every page after ”/“ from indexing, even though everything seems right. Thank you so much. FzSQkqB.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | AslanBarselinov1 -
Wordpress #comment links?
We just started our trial account and have the results from our first Moz Pro Site Crawl. It's showing that we have a large portion of our pages have 'Too Many Links' and I'm trying to determine exactly what this means and how to fix it. The article referenced is from 2011 and doesn't fully address what I'm looking for. Here are a few questions: 1. Can we lower the 'link count' by adding a 'no follow' or does too many links, count links regardless? The question being, is the only way to solve this by removing links or are their no follow or no index options that will prevent us from having this issue moving forward? 2. Comment Links: Our site is in Wordpress and I just recognized that each of the comment links are followed: https://screencast.com/t/b0CIKVafWw. These aren't links from our users, rather these are links within Wordpress and are structured like this: https://mysite.com/blog-post/#comment-6970. From my screenshot you can see they are highlighted as 'followed links'. Is there a setting within Wordpress to turn this off or is there another option I should consider? Should we just make these no index, no follow links? Will that solve the 'Too many links' problem? I searched through the Q&A's and couldn't find an answer directly to my question. Most were around people leaving links in the comments section, which isn't what I'm looking for. Thank you for any help you can provide.
On-Page Optimization | | FabulesslyFrugal0 -
Blog issue broken link
Taking Great Photographs Underwater May 25, 2015 By sdwellers@aol.com No comments yet florida keys, key largo diving Excuse my ignorance, I suspect this is an easy issue...but at the the top of each of my blog posts have what you see above....the "No Comments yet" tab is showing as a broken link 404 error...?Why? And how to fix?Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | sdwellers0 -
Home Page Text Placement - In Widget?
My client has a blank homepage that showcases his work in a slideshow. As a result, his homepage will not rank. I've created landing pages and they have started to rank, but he is not a fan of them. He wants to add a widget below the menu, essentially where you have to scroll down to see it (no one will ever see it) with the text/onsite optimization we need to get him to rank. This will leave him with his blank homepage that he likes. My gut reaction is that the text needs to be in the actual page, not a sidebar widget. What do you think? Will this method work?
On-Page Optimization | | columbiaseo0 -
Canonical URL Category and Tags
Hello, I would like to know that I want to use both category and tags in my blog StylishMahi. If I index both category and tags, should I use canonical URL tag to pass referring to main category. As I want more my categories in SERP results ranking higher? I have also attached a picture. Can someone please confirm? Photo by Moz ZigdWMx
On-Page Optimization | | PratapSingh0 -
Html to wordpress
I have an html site and most of my pages are ranking well. I want to switch to wordpress but i am afraid that i will loose ranking on my inner pages. Any thoughts? And should i do a redirect or use a html plugin
On-Page Optimization | | benjaminmarcinc0 -
Google index text that I can not find
Hello everybody, As you can see here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:G-iicHoDJeYJ:www.billigste-internet.dk/&hl=da&gl=dk&strip=1 Google index the text "Forside" as the H1 tag, and "Right" and "Left" as body text, on my website. But I do not want that Google indexes this. But when I look in mine source code (see here: view-source:http://www.billigste-internet.dk/) I can not find "Forside", "rigth" or "Left", so I can delete it. Is there anyone who can help me where I need to delete the text "Forside", "Right" and "Left", so Google does not index this text? Hope someone can help.
On-Page Optimization | | JoLindahl910 -
How do I do a 301 Redirect in IIS 7 from http://www.freightmonster.com/index.html to http://freightmonster.com/index.html when I don't have a physical page to redirect?
I'm trying to get rid of my Rel Canonical links and use the 301 Redirect instead.
On-Page Optimization | | FreightBoy0