Portfolio Image Landing Page Question/Issue

[Ben-R]

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.

[slatronica]

Maybe think about noindex-follow the thin pages and create an image sitemap to make sure your images are crawled.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en

[brettmandoes]

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.

[Ben-R]

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,

[Ben-R]

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.

[brettmandoes]

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.