Wordpress photo blog with sparse text - noindex posts, index categories?

[matt_b]

Hi everyone,

I have a wordpress blog that is heavy on photos but short on text - most of my posts consist of a photo linking to a full gallery, and a short description of 1-4 sentences.  I've often read recommendations to noindex category pages, but in this case I'm wondering if it might be best to noindex the individual posts instead - I'm concerned that the short posts might seem like thin content to Google compared to the category pages which aggregate the posts.  Also, some of my categories reflect keywords that I'd like to rank well for.  I have about a dozen categories and close to 1000 posts.

[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

Hey Matt —

I have a couple of questions:

• How competitive are the keywords you're interested in winning? (Are these battles you can reasonably win?)
• What's your objective for ranking? Blog followers? Converting for leads? (SEO is largely text-based; are you better off solving your business objectives in other ways?)
• Do you alt-text your photos? (Have you attracting attention via Google image search?)

I doubt that noindexing the posts would help you out—I don't think you're penalized for having pages that are thin on content (they're just less SEO friendly). I would leave them indexed; then also figure out how to beef up your category page design to rank better.

— Andrew

[matt_b]

Thanks Andrew!

I guess I will leave indexing as is for now (indexed categories, posts, and pages; noindexed archives).

The competitiveness of the keywords I'm interested in range from moderate to high. I should mention it is an adult-oriented site in a particular niche (outdoor nude photography).  I formerly ranked well in many of the keywords before Panda came out.  Over the course of a couple years I went from ~3500 daily visitors from Google to < 500 (analytics screenshot attached).  My objective is to generate enough affiliate sales to make a small profit, or at minimum break even with hosting costs - this is just a hobby for me, I have been running the site since ~1999.  I alt-text the photos. But most of the images are provided by the affiliates so maybe that is the real problem - too many other sites have the same images.  However I give them my own unique alt text and rename the image files to be more descriptive.

-Matt

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[AndrewAtMGXCopy]

Np! I asked about the competitiveness aspect b/c it might behoove you to redirect your marketing energies elsewhere, i.e.

• Focus on building followers (i.e. social media) (spread versus rank)
• Syndicate your content beyond your current affiliates (watermarked, ofc) on other sites to drive traffic that way
• Make an special effort to make your content "thicker" to see if the rise in rankings is worth the increase in writing time

Without knowing the ins' and outs' of your work, those would be two of my guesses. I wouldn't be surprised if there is social media specifically friendly to your niche.

P.S. Yikes on the traffic!

[Dr-Pete]

I tend to agree with Andrew that blocking all 1,000 pages really removes you from a lot of potential ranking opportunities, but two issues come into play:

(1) You may be stuck behind the safe-search wall, which can really diminish the ability of those pages to rank.

(2) The existence of these photos on other sites is definitely going to increase the chances of something like a Panda penalty, or, at the very least, aggressive filtering of that content.

Long-term, I think what Andrew said about making the content richer is critical - you're going to have to provide a clear value-add that Google can see. In the mean-time, it doesn't have to be all-or-none. Maybe instead of opening up all 1,000 photos to ranking you could open up just your most popular category, try to beef up that content, and see how it goes?

[matt_b]

Thanks Peter!  Maybe I will give that a try.