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
-
Our original content is being outranked on search engines by smaller sites republishing our content.
We a media site, www.hope1032.com.au that publishes daily content on the WordPress platform using the Yoast SEO plugin. We allow smaller media sites to republish some of our content with canonical field using our URL. We have discovered some of our content is now ranking below Or not visible on some search engines when searching for the article heading. Any thoughts as to why? Have we got an SEO proble? An interesting point is the small amount of content we have republished is not ranking against the original author on search engines.
Technical SEO | | Hope-Media0 -
No Java, No Content..?
Hello Mozers! 🙂 I have a question for you: I am working on a site and while doing an audit I disabled JavaScript via the Web Developer plugin for Chrome. The result is that instead of seeing the page content, I see the typical “loading circle” but nothing else. I imagine this not a good thing but what does this implies technically from crawler perspective? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Pipistrella0 -
174 Duplicate Content Errors
How do I go about fixing these errors? There are all related to my tags. Thank you in advance for any help! Lisa
Technical SEO | | lisarein0 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, I'm working on a site and I'm having some issues with its structure causing duplicate content. The first issue is that the search pages will show up as duplicates.
Technical SEO | | OOMDODigital
A search for new inventory may be new.aspx
The duplicate may be something like new.aspx=page1, or something like that and so on. The second issue is with inventory. When new inventory gets put into the stock of the store, a new page for that item will be populated with duplicate content. There appears to be no canonical source for that page. How can I fix both of these? Thanks!0 -
Determining where duplicate content comes from...
I am getting duplicate content warnings on the SEOMOZ crawl. I don't know where the content is duplicated. Is there a site that will find duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | JML11790 -
Duplicate content due to csref
Hi, When i go trough my page, i can see that alot of my csref codes result in duplicate content, when SeoMoz run their analysis of my pages. Off course i get important knowledge through my csref codes, but im quite uncertain of how much it effects my SEO-results. Does anyone have any insights in this? Should i be more cautios to use csref-codes or dosent it create problems that are big enough for me to worry about them.
Technical SEO | | Petersen110 -
Does turning website content into PDFs for document sharing sites cause duplicate content?
Website content is 9 tutorials published to unique urls with a contents page linking to each lesson. If I make a PDF version for distribution of document sharing websites, will it create a duplicate content issue? The objective is to get a half decent link, traffic to supplementary opt-in downloads.
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
Magento and Duplicate content
I have been working with Magento over the last few weeks and I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the way it is setup. If you go to a product page and remove the sub folders one by one you can reach the same product pages causing duplicate content. All magento sites seem to have this weakness. So use this site as an example because I know it is built on magento, http://www.gio-goi.com/men/clothing/tees/throve-t-short.html?cid=756 As you remove the tees then the clothing and men sub folders you can still reach the product page. My first querstion is how big an issue is this and two does anyone have any ideas of how to solve it? Also I was wondering how does google treat question marks in urls? Should you try and avoid them unless you are filtering? Thanks
Technical SEO | | gregster10001