Portfolio Image Landing Page Question/Issue
-
Hello,
We have a client with a very image heavy website. They have Portfolio pages with a large number of images. We are currently working on adding more copy to the site but wanted to confirm we are taking the right approach for the images on the site.
Under the current structure each image has its own landing page (with no copy) and is fed in (or generated on) to a Portfolio Page. While we know this is not ideal as it would be best to have the images on the Portfolio Page directly or even fill out the landing pages with copy; due to the amount of images and the fact these are only images (and not a 'targeted' page) that would not really be feasible.
Aside from the thin content concern these individual landing pages were being indexed so they are showing hundreds of pages on their sitemap.xml and in GSC even though they only have a few actual pages.
In the meantime we went into each image-page and placed a canonical tag back to the main Portfolio Page (with the hopes to add content to that page and have it as the ‘overarching’ page). Would this be the right approach? – We considered ‘noindex-follow’ tags but would want the images to be crawled; the issue is because the pages are not on the actual page are we canonicalizing these images to nothing?
Any insight would really be appreciated.
Thank you in advance.
-
Standard operating procedure for us is to nofollow anything we noindex. Theory is that pagerank will still flow through a link to another page that has been noindexed if you don't nofollow it. But since it has been noindexed the PR will just be trapped there and can't move on to another page through any links on that page.
I don't know how true that theory is, but erring on the side of caution has never cost me a dime, and nofollowing links to a page that is noindexed won't have a negative impact.
-
Thanks again. We noticed you mentioned 'nofollowing' the pages but Steve said no-index, follow so we just wanted to confirm which you would recommend for these image/landing pages?
Best,
- B.
-
Thank you both for your answers and help.
I’m not sure why they set it up that way it was executed before I came on board. The site actually has a ‘gallery style’ page (with the enlarging function) but I believe they uploaded them to the Portfolio through those landing page URLs. Still trying to figure out the how and why.
For now we placed ‘no-index,follow’ tags on each image/page and will make sure each image is listed on the sitemap and has the right files names/alt text, which should help thank you.
It’s not how I would have set it up but there are so many images already in this structure. The help is very appreciated and if there is anything I might have missed please let me know.
Thanks again.
Best,
-
Is there some reason you need to have individual landing pages for each image? That's a lot of bloat. Hundreds (or thousands) of unique landing pages with nothing but an image isn't going to convey either relevance or authority to search engines, nor does it sound particularly useful to users.
Since Googlebot can't "see" the images, I would follow Steve's advice and add the images to your sitemap, noindex and nofollowing the pages that lack content. Taking it a step further, I would also make sure the filenames are readable by search engines and alt text is entered for each image. Doing so will help Google understand what the images are and may help display you for relevant queries.
You may want to consider just doing gallery style pages for your portfolios with the option to enlarge a photo to max resolution by clicking on it if you're just trying to let users see a larger image. Probably will help with UX on top of SEO.
-
Maybe think about noindex-follow the thin pages and create an image sitemap to make sure your images are crawled.
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
-
Will google be able to crawl all of the pages given that the pages displayed or the info on a page varies according to the city of a user?
So the website I am working for asks for a location before displaying the product pages. There are two cities with multiple warehouses. Based on the users' location, the product pages available in the warehouse serving only in that area are shown. If the user skips location, default warehouse-related product pages are shown. The APIs are all location-based.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Airlift0 -
Major Landing page removed from Google SERP and replace homepage URL.How do I fix it?
Hi Major Landing page removed from Google SERP and replace homepage URL.How do I fix it? In an SPA website (angularJS), Why it happens?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cafegardesh0 -
What is the impact of an off-topic page to other pages on the site?
We are working with a client who has one irrelevant, off-topic post ranking incredibly well and driving a lot of traffic. However, none of the other pages on the site, that are relevant to this client's business, are ranking. Links are good and in-line with competitors for the various terms. Oddly, very few external links reference this off-topic post, most are to the home page. Local profile is also in-line with competitors, including reviews, categorization, geo-targeting, pictures, etc. No spam issues exist and no warnings in Google Search Console. The only thing that seems weird is this off-topic post but that could affect rankings on other pages of the site? Would removing that off-topic post potentially help increase traffic and rankings for the other more relevant pages of the site? Appreciate any and all help or ideas of where to go from here. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
Question & Review should be seperate page
Hi pls look at the below page, http://www.powerwale.com/store/exide-xplore-xltz4-3ah-battery/76933 is questions and review should be in seperate page, as i think that in the future the comments, will become Key word stuffing for the product page. Pls suggest.. If yes, suggest the best url as well.. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rahim1191 -
My landing pages don't show up in the SERPs, only my frontpage does.
I am having some trouble with getting the landing pages for a clients website to show up in the SERPs.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | InmediaDK
As far as I can see, the pages are optimized well, and they also get indexed by Google. The website is a danish webshop that sells wine, www.vindanmark.com Take for an instance this landing page, http://www.vindanmark.com/vinhandel/
It is optimzied for the keywords "Vinhandel Århus". Vinhandel means "Winestore" and "Århus" is a danish city. As you can see, I manage to get them at page 1 (#10), but it's the frontpage that ranks for the keyword. And this goes for alle the other landing pages as well. But I can't figure out, why the frontpage keep outranking the landingpages on every keyword.
What am I doing wrong here?1 -
Should we show(to google) different city pages on our website which look like home page as one page or different? If yes then how?
On our website, we show events from different cities. We have made different URL's for each city like www.townscript.com/mumbai, www.townscript.com/delhi. But the page of all the cities looks similar, only the events change on those different city pages. Even our home URL www.townscript.com, shows the visitor the city which he visited last time on our website(initially we show everyone Mumbai, visitor needs to choose his city then) For every page visit, we save the last visited page of a particular IP address and next time when he visits our website www.townscript.com, we show him that city only which he visited last time. Now, we feel as the content of home page, and city pages is similar. Should we show these pages as one page i.e. Townscript.com to Google? Can we do that by rel="canonical" ? Please help me! As I think all of these pages are competing with each other.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchitmalik0 -
Best Strategy to display 8mg Images on Product Pages for Ecommerce
I have an ecommerce store that has a variety of images including some super high quality images that are 8 mg. This style of image could be completed for hundreds of products in the store. Does anyone have any tips on what I should be watching out for here? Is 8 mg too unusable?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LukeyJamo0 -
How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?
SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ContentWriterMicky0