Web Developer Using Stock Photos
-
Hello,
The organization is selling a cms system in a niche market across the country. It has the normal SEO challenges, in addition he is using purchased stock images.
This seemed ok, while he was smaller but now we are growing rapidly and these images are VERY STOCK- and well used ( I have checked with Tiny Eye).
I remember a few years ago this was a flag to the search engines who went through manual review, is this still true?
It seems to me that the theme's that come with the images, are duplicated ( including navigation & footers), so having the duplicated images would be another negative.
Thank you for your suggestions!
-
You should be good to go. According to Rand the footers, menus, and sidebar content is ignored. What is seen as unique is only the body section of the page. Here is the link:
Hope this answers your question.
-
Unique, Innovative, Fresh Content is what search engines are looking for. Having stock or generic images isn't necessary bad, but not exactly good. Does that help?
-
I think if the stock image fits your brand then it's ok to use it. To the best of my knowledge the cover of Snow Leopard is actually a stock image, so even the best prefer to trust a professional to photograph a live snow leopard.
But back to your question I would certainly apply the names and alt tags to the business, so I wouldn't just use the most generic of naming conventions. Maybe a photo of happy customers would read "my_brand_testimonials" especially if it is on the testimonials page of your site. I would also make sure the stock is not commonly associated with your industry and that it's not too popular. If it is consider not making an image site map.
Another practice I would use would be if possible to alter the images for your use. Of course this is assuming you have the rights to make those modifications. But simple modifications can go a long way at explaining things. I myself have used skitch to draw attention to certain points.
Things I wouldn't do are to use a stock boardroom and claim it's the office. In this case theres really no stock solution and it looks deceiving.
I've never experienced this in a negative way but I find it hard to believe Google would penalize someone for using stock navigation buttons. I suppose if someone was crafting a directory using a popular directory software and provided little to no SEO value, but was the only player in a razor thin niche, then maybe being completely stock would hurt the site. But one could argue it never stood a chance regardless.
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
-
Which woocommerce product filter plugin should I use?
Hi! I have to choose a premium woocommerce product filter plugin, but I can't make up my mind since there are so many options out there. I tried to compare some of them, but I would like to hear from experts or people who already bought and run one of them on their websites in order to focus on the better one. Is there a particular plugin which stands out from the crowd? Are there product filter plugins you definitely do not recommend buying? What I am looking for is a SEO oriented plugin( some search results by filters like sizes, colors, in stock /out of stock should not be indexed at all while categories should be normally indexed), easy to use (I am not a developer and I have to be able to set up filters by myself easily), compatible with wpml and and, last but not least, the plugin support should be reliable and helpful. I am looking forward to your suggestions. thanks in advance
Web Design | | manunika0 -
Ecommerce web design read more toggle vs menu link on home page and product pages
Hello, We have an Ecommerce store. We have a lot of content on the home page and product pages and we are going back and forth between which one to use between a toggle "Read More" "Show Less" toggle for each section and a anchor linked menu. We have long product pages We're thinking a read more toggle is more appropriate for category descriptions so that they can go at the top of the category and not take up space. But the read more toggle with lots of content scrolls the page down and doesn't scroll it back up when you hit "show less" We're leaning towards a linked menu for the home pages and product pages for this reason, but an accordion type set of toggles would look nicer. What do you recommend, and how have you set up your read more toggles if they have lots of info so that they are not confusing? Are there other options? ' Not looking for code (I can do that) I'm looking for ideas on the cleanest home page, category pages, and product pages when they have tons and tons of textual content. Wanting to trim it up and make it look compact and neat! Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
Should i be using shortcodes for my my page content.
Hello, I have a question. Sorry if this is been answered before. Recently I decided to do a little face lift to my main website pages. I wanted to make my testimonials more pretty. Found this great plugin for testimonials which creates shortcodes. I love how it looks like, but just realised that when I use images in shortcodes, these are not picked up by search engines 😞 only text is. Image search ability is pretty important for me and I'm not sure if I should stick with my plain design and upload images manually with all alt tags and title tags or there is a way to adjust shortcode so it shows images to search engines. You can see example here. https://a-fotografy.co.uk/maternity-photographer-edinburgh/ Let me know your thoughts guys. Regards, Armands
Web Design | | A_Fotografy1 -
Https pages indexed but all web pages are http - please can you offer some help?
Dear Moz Community, Please could you see what you think and offer some definite steps or advice.. I contacted the host provider and his initial thought was that WordPress was causing the https problem ?: eg when an https version of a page is called, things like videos and media don't always show up. A SSL certificate that is attached to a website, can allow pages to load over https. The host said that there is no active configured SSL it's just waiting as part of the hosting package just in case, but I found that the SSL certificate is still showing up during a crawl.It's important to eliminate the https problem before external backlinks link to any of the unwanted https pages that are currently indexed. Luckily I haven't started any intense backlinking work yet, and any links I have posted in search land have all been http version.I checked a few more url's to see if it’s necessary to create a permanent redirect from https to http. For example, I tried requesting domain.co.uk using the https:// and the https:// page loaded instead of redirecting automatically to http prefix version. I know that if I am automatically redirected to the http:// version of the page, then that is the way it should be. Search engines and visitors will stay on the http version of the site and not get lost anywhere in https. This also helps to eliminate duplicate content and to preserve link juice. What are your thoughts regarding that?As I understand it, most server configurations should redirect by default when https isn’t configured, and from my experience I’ve seen cases where pages requested via https return the default server page, a 404 error, or duplicate content. So I'm confused as to where to take this.One suggestion would be to disable all https since there is no need to have any traces to SSL when the site is even crawled ?. I don't want to enable https in the htaccess only to then create a https to http rewrite rule; https shouldn't even be a crawlable function of the site at all.RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTPS} offor to disable the SSL completely for now until it becomes a necessity for the website.I would really welcome your thoughts as I'm really stuck as to what to do for the best, short term and long term.Kind Regards
Web Design | | SEOguy10 -
Should I Use An Animated Javascript Responsive Site
Hi, hope someone might be able to help me with this. I am setting my son up with a website for his small painting and decorating company. However, I am a wordpress stalwart and he has seen a theme which is a javascript animated responsive theme from template monster. Its not my choice just he is adamant that he wants it. However, I am slightly concerned that Google cannot index as well with these kind of sites as they would with a standard HTML site. I would be grateful if someone could confirm if they can be indexed etc. The content appears in what I can only describe as lightboxes. Thanks
Web Design | | denismilton0 -
Footer link back to developers domain
I have read a lot about where it is suggested to either not put an attribute link in the footer of a clients site or to no follow it. But I have a little bit different take on the question. How does this work on a large scale? Are these manual penalties, or are they automatic? By large scale, I am talking about big cms programs such as Wordpress, Joomla, and the likes of those. They all have links back to their site in the footer of the default templates. Is this bad? Does it not rally matter on the scale of companies such as this?
Web Design | | LesleyPaone0 -
Using (duplicate) content in different contexts
I have three distinct hosting products, each solving three different problems. While these three products have different features in terms of functionality, they are all built on the same platform. Now, in terms of marketing some features of the platform, f.ex. High Availability, is significant to all of the products. How do I go about to include information about this feature on all product pages without getting penalized for duplicate content? Is there a way to tell Google that parts of the content on the pages for product 1-3 is duplicated with intent, or duplicated from f.ex. a page that explains the technical aspects of the platform?
Web Design | | SYSE0 -
Web Design for Ecommerce like wanelo
Hi, I have a client that wants to design an ecommerce site like http://www.wanelo.com/ initially they want to set up a first release to test their market using just he basic functionality thereofre you see a picture click on it add toshopping cart an buy. Does anyone know of a theme that can be used on wordpress or any other ecommerce system that has a pre defined theme as http://www.wanelo.com/ Thanks
Web Design | | VivaArturo
Arthur0