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
-
Dropdown content on page being crawled
Hi, will the content within a dropdown on a page be crawled? I.e. if the page visitor has to click to reveal the content as a dropdown will it be crawled by bots. Thanks
Technical SEO | | BillSCC1 -
Duplicate content analysis
Hi all,We have some pages being flagged as duplicates by the google search console. However, we believe the content on these pages is distinctly different (for example, they have completely different search results returned, different headings etc). An example of two pages google finds to be duplicates is below. if anyone can spot what might be causing the duplicate issue here, would very much appreciate suggestions! Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | Eric_S
Examples: https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/IFA-financial-advisor-mortgage/harborne
https://www.vouchedfor.co.uk/accountant/harborne0 -
What do you use to come up with content ideas?
Buzzsumo charge and not sure it's worth it. didn't find Quora helpful. Any others?
Technical SEO | | SwanseaMedicine2 -
Shopify Duplicate Content in products
Hello Moz Community, New to Moz and looking forward to beginning my journey towards SEO education and improving our clients' sites. Our client's website is a Shopify store. https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/ Our first Moz reports show 686 duplicate content issues. I will show the first 4 as examples. https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-eagle-teardrop-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-orca-silver-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/silver-oval-earrings https://spiritsofthewestcoast.com/collections/native-earrings-and-studs-in-silver-and-gold/products/haida-eagle-spirit-silver-earrings As you can see, URL titles are unique. But I know that the content in each of those products have very similar product descriptions but not exactly. But since they have been flagged as a site issue by Moz, I am guessing that the content is 95% duplicate. So can a rel=canonical be the right solution for this type of duplicate content? Or should I be considering adding new content to each of 686 products to drop below the 95% threshold? Or another solution that I may not be aware of. Thanks in advance for your assistance and expertise! Sean
Technical SEO | | TheUpdateCompany1 -
Finding a specific link - Duplicating my own content
Hi Mozzers, This may be a bit of a n00b question and i feel i should know the answer but alas, here i am asking. I have a page www.website.co.uk/page/ and im getting a duplicate page report of www.website.co.uk/Page/ i know this is because somewhere on my website a link will exists using the capitalised version. I have tried everything i can think of to find it but with no luck, any little tricks? I could always rewrite the urls to lowercase, but I have downloadable software etc also on the website that i dont want to take the capitals out of. So the best solution seems to be finding the link and remove it. Most link checkers I use treat the capitalised and non capitalised as the same thing so really arent helping lol.
Technical SEO | | ATP0 -
Indexing pages content that is not needed
Hi All, I have a site that has articles and a side block that shows interesting articles in a column block. While we google for a keyword i can see the page but the meta description is picked from the side block "interesting articles" and not the actual article in the page. How can i deny indexing that block alone Thanks
Technical SEO | | jomin740 -
Premium Content
Hey Guys I woking on a site that publishes hundreds of new content a day and part of the content is only available for users for 30 days. After 30 days the content is only accessible to premium users.
Technical SEO | | Mr.bfz
After 30 days, the page removes the content and replaces it with a log in/ sign up option. The same URL is kept for each page and the title of the article.
I have 2 concerns about this method. Is it healthy for the site to be removing tons of content of live pages and replace with a log in options Should I worry about Panda for creating tons of pages with unique URL but very similar source /content - the log in module and the text explaining that it is only available to premium users. The site is pretty big so google has some tolerance of things we can get away with it. Should I add a noindex attribute for those pages after 30 days? Even though it can takes months until google actually removes from the index. Is there a proper way for performing this type of feature in sites with a log in option after a period of time (first click free is not an option) Thanks Guys and I appreciate any help!0 -
I have 2 websites with the same content
Hello everyone, this is my first post here on SEOmoz and I have a questions that I cannot seem to figure out. So here is my scenario: I have 2 websites that are identical. The only difference between the 2 websites is the domain name. This was done a while back for marketing purposes, however, I am no longer needing my 2nd website. What is the best way to get rid of this second website? I still have about 1 paying customer a day convert on this 2nd website and I do not want to loose them, however, I know that I am getting penalized by the search engines because of this duplicate content. Please let me know the best way of going about this. PS: I have read about 301 redirects, canonicalizing URLs, and other methods but do not know which one to choose. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | threebiz0