Thin Content due to Photo Galleries

[Mulle]

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

[DmitriiK]

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.

[DirkC]

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

[Mulle]

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

[DmitriiK]

Hi. I wouldn't use "noindex", so images are actually getting into Google's image search etc, but canonical sounds fine.