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Any more thoughts on this?

Thank you Samuel for your reply as well.

Yes, what you describe is exactly what I also learned: no need to be too much "redundant" about keywords, but SEs will understand from the surrounding context... well, fact is some of our competitors are doing what I am suggesting here and they are dominating the 1st spot on Google for most of the keywords we are competing with. They also have a more clear "siloed" category-sub-category structure than us, which suggests this technique combined with the siloing technique help a great deal (also, note that for most category pages we compete with, we have much more external links than them! Hence my though that a more clear, siloed structure could help)

And of course, anything we do is with the user in mind: ALT text is always meant for users first, but I don't see harm in being a little bit redundant on that if it could help with SEO as well, don't you?

Thank you again very much, and please, any additional idea you may have is very welcome!

Thank you Rob for your extensive reply.

I see what you mean, and I am aware of that. This "link technique" suggestion is part of a bigger plan I am working on where the goal is to create a more "siloed" structure to increase topical relevancy as I have discussed on this other thread of mine:

https://moz.com/community/q/panda-rankings-and-other-non-sense-issues

And even though that's a minor thing, everything adds up. For example, we have recently moved from http to https and that's also is a minor thing, but adds up with all other improvements we are working on.

As for your suggestion:

"I would consider is replacing the example music videos from your specific instruments pages to your home page so visitors know what kind of quality they are getting if they subscribe."

I don't exactly understand what you mean, are you talking about our own produced Music Expert videos or the YouTube videos inside our product pages submitted by the users?

Thank you again

Hello everyone,

I am working to create sub-category pages on our website virtualsheetmusic.com, and I'd like to have your thoughts on using a combination of images and text as anchor text in order to maximize keyword relevancy.

Here is an example (I'll keep it simple):

Let's take our violin sheet music main category page located at /violin/, which includes the following sub-categories:

• Christmas

• Classical

• Traditional

So, the idea is to list the above sub-categories as links on the main violin sheet music page, and if we had to use simple text links, that would be something like:

Christmas
Classical
Traditional

Now, since what we really would like to target are keywords like:

"christmas violin sheet music"

"classical violin sheet music"

"traditional violin sheet music"

I would be tempted to make the above links as follows:

Christmas violin sheet music
Classical violin sheet music
Traditional violin sheet music

But I am sure that would be too much overwhelming for the users, even if the best CSS design were applied to it. So, my idea would be to combine images with text, in a way to put those long-tail keywords inside the image ALT tag, so to have links like these:

Christmas
Classical
Traditional

That would allow a much easier way to work the UI , and at the same time keep relevancy for each link. I have seen some of our competitors doing that and they have top-notch results on the SEs.

My questions are:

1. Do you see any negative effect of doing this kind of links from the SEO standpoint?

2. Would you suggest any better way to accomplish what I am trying to do?

I am eager to know your thoughts about this. Thank you in advance to anyone!

Great! Glad to know that. Thank you Dimitrii, I appreciated your help very much!

Thank you Dimitrii to clarifying, actually all our webpages now load images only via the https://, but since many external websites are hard-linking to many of our images via the regular http:// protocol, I was thinking to allow linking to them the "insecure" way if requested. Do you see my point? So... to better clarify my initial question, let's say Google is spidering one of those external affiliates and finds an image tag like this:

Will Google consider the image found at:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/image.jpg

a duplicate of:

https://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/image.jpg

?? This was my original question...

In any case, I have made some testings today, and I have been able to redirect all images via .htaccess permanently (301) to https:// and looks like even if an image is requested with the http:// from the browser, it shows up correctly because the web browser handles redirects for images in the same way it handles them for the web page itself.

So... my concern should be solved this way. But in case, for any reason, I need to be able to serve the same image from both protocols (http or https) it is my understand that that shouldn't be an issue anyway. Is my assumption correct?

Thanks again.

Thank you Dimitrii for your reply.

Well, your two statements above contradicts each other, in my opinion. You see, what really concerns me is your last suggestion:

"it's better to make sure that images (and all the other resources) available only through one protocol - http or https."

And hence my original concern. Why should we make sure that images are available only through one protocol if you say first that there isn't such thing as duplicate content for images? Why should we concern about that then?

Sorry for my further request for clarification. I really appreciated your help!

Hello everyone,

We have recently moved our entire website virtualsheetmusic.com from http:// to https:// and now we are facing a question about images.

Here is the deal: All webpages URLs are properly redirected to their corresponding https if they are called from former http links. Whereas, due to compatibility issues, all images URLs can be called either via http or https, so that any of the following URLs work without any redirect:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/images/icons/ResponsiveLogo.png

https://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/images/icons/ResponsiveLogo.png

Please note though that all internal links are relative and not absolute.

So, my question is: Can that be a problem from the SEO stand point? In particular: We have thousands of images indexed on Google, mostly images related to our digital sheet music preview image files, and many of them are ranking pretty well in the image pack search results. Could this change be detrimental in some way? Or doesn't make any difference in the eyes of Google? As I wrote above, all internal links are relative, so an image tag like this one:

Hasn't changed at all, it is just loaded in a https context.

I'll wait for your thoughts on this. Thank you in advance!

Thank you very much Julie, I really appreciated your words. I have wondered so many times what Google think of "quality", and why before us there are always very low quality websites distributing the exact same music for free (often copyrighted music, which is illegal) and most of those sites are full of ads. Is that quality?

We could open a new discussion thread on the "What is quality to Google?" topic, I think it'd be very popular!

Thank you again.

Thank you Donna, glad to know that I am not completely mad!!

As for the fact they have done a great job with title and alt tags, anchor texts, I agree, but you know what? That's another realm where I became paranoid for, the so called "over-optimization"... We used to have perfectly optimized titles, descriptions,  H1,s ALTs, anchor text, etc... the whole enchilada perfectly optimized, then we began to lose rankings for an unknown reason (Panda? Over-optimization? Too many pages? What else?), and I began becoming paranoid about everything, so we started "de-optimizing" here and there, etc... Here is additional proof that when things are NOT clear, we all become paranoid and lose control on everything.

I may also add that some of the blame should be probably given to the SEO industry that has spread a lot of fear about all this stuff, without giving an absolute "quantification" of what means "too much optimization", or... too much duplicate content, or too much thing content, or too much bad links, etc... how much is "too much"? That's the question for which I am afraid there's not easy answer, but maybe they scared us too much about all this.

Thank you again, and please, let me know if you have any more ideas.

Oh, I also forgot to make you note that when we have more than one version for the same title and same instrument, we add a canonical to the first version.

For example, both items below:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-170563.html

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-119157.html

Are canonicalized to this item:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/HL-180308.html

Thanks

Thank you Donna!

Yes, I am aware we have much more segmentation, but why in the heck that should be bad? And, more importantly, why that should be worse than having much more actual duplicate content than they have if you consider they never use canonicals nor noindex to avoid duplicate issues.

Take for example one of their instrumental pages like this one:

https://www.8notes.com/violin/sheet_music/?orderby=5d

You can order the results by title, artist, level, etc... they don't even care to have duplicate issues by canonicalizing the URL when parameters are added to it. What do you think may be worse for Panda? I am just asking, I'd really like to understand what can be worse.

They have similar issues with their product pages, if you click on their tabs at the top, parameters get added to the URLs but no canonical is present there. We do have canonicals instead, as by Google's manual.

As for having duplicate titles (because of different instrumental versions), yes, that's something we have tackled in the past several times, tried to remove the duplicates (noindexed) but didn't help. I mean, we didn't notice any change by doing that waiting several months after the change. We just got much lower traffic because of that, but nothing positive.

Also, have a look at our competitor how many different version they have for some of the most popular titles:

Bach's Air on G: https://www.8notes.com/scores/air_on_the_g_string_bach_johann_sebastian.asp

Bach's Minuet: https://www.8notes.com/scores/minuet_bach_johann_sebastian.asp

Beethoven's Fur Elise: https://www.8notes.com/scores/fur_elise_beethoven_ludwig_van.asp

Beethoven's Ode to Joy: https://www.8notes.com/scores/ode_to_joy_(9th_symphony)_beethoven_ludwig_van.asp

Now, I understand we may have many more titles than them, our catalog is much bigger than theirs, but still they have similar issues, right? If so, why they have a very privileged spot in SERPs compared to us? I am sorry to sound like a broken record, but I am still not convinced the problem here is all this...

If you have the chance, I am eager to know your after thoughts... thank you again very much for your help and time Donna. Appreciated very much.

Thank you Donna for your reply.

Well, I see what you mean, but if you look how those drill-downs are handled on our site, all pages generated dynamically that way are excluded by robots.txt. That's why I am puzzled to see the competitor's website having a similar kind of browsing without worrying about duplicate issues.  Also, I apply any possible rule to reduce duplicate content as much as I can even for those few indexed pages such as the use of canonicals (when parameters are present in the URLs) or the use of rel="prev" or rel="next" for paginated content.

Please, let me know if that's what you meant or I am missing anything here.

Thank you again very much!

Yes, I agree with you, I don't see much logic beyond that. Of course, if they also count images, we have hundreds of thousands... we are a pretty big website, what do you expect, right?

My website situation makes people "scratch their heads", all the time...

I'd really like to know from you if you see anything on my website that could trigger a "Panda" kind of of penalization, compared to my mentioned competitor above (8nots.com). So far, no one on this thread has given me any hints on that.

Thank you again for your insights, I appreciated it very much.

Donna, as a side note, I have no idea where Majestic pulled out over 944,000 indexed pages for our website. By spidering it with Screaming Frog we couldn't crawl more than 387,726 pages... unless they crawled all links dynamically generated by our internal search engine, which by the way, is blocked by the robots.txt file, therefore all those dynamic pages should be not counted.

Also, on the actual Google index, if you use the site: command, you'll see that Google has indexed just 123,000 pages from our site (because most of them are canonicalized), whereas you'll see over 545,000 for 8notes.com.

Actual data seems to be a little different...

Thank you Julie for your posting and for participating in this discussion.

Well, what you say might be true, but being an algorithmic penalization that shouldn't really happen... unless the system is flawed in some way to catch the wrong guys (every time?)

Also, thin and duplicate content is so much more obvious and noticeable on our competitors that makes me completely mad trying to find a logical explanation of why me and not them!

Unless, Panda or other similar "quality" updates are looking now for something else nobody has clearly understood yet...

Thank you Kristen,

I have just put down a plan to re-architect our website that way and create "sub-categories" in the same way our competitor has done to push-up the main category pages as well (according to the "soloing" technique).

As I wrote yesterday below, this is also something clearly NOT related to Panda... just another needed tweak to the site.

Thank you again, appreciated your help!

Thank you Donna! Yes, I am aware of our different back link profile. We are a commercial website, therefore we have many backlinks from hundreds of affiliates... and that could cause issues, I am aware of that. I have worked a lot with my affiliate to put nofollow links where necessary, and to not pass page rank as much as possible...  But again, we are talking about issues NOT Panda related... right?

So... again, this can't explain why the first Panda in 2011 as well as the last quality update released in June (was that really Panda?) has hit us hard. I am getting convinced that it is not Panda the beast hitting us once in a while, but something else... my point is: I could be under "several" penalties, ok, I get that... I could be under some Panda penalization, or other quality penalization, and maybe Penguin to some extent (I could never find a clear relation between my traffic loss and the release of Penguin updates though)... but if I am really in the eye of Panda when that happen, back to my original question, why my competitor has never been touched by the white & black bear when its content should be much more prone to Panda than mine? That's the whole point of my conversation here and the answer I am trying to find. I am trying to find a logical explanation of why my traffic dropped with the release of Panda updates, whereas my competitor wasn't touched at all.

Thank you again for your help, appreciated!

In any case, I created this thread to discuss about Panda and its "possible" and "not-possible" implications... so, the discussion is still be open.

In the meantime I wait with hope for an answer to my questions above from Kristen (thank you again Kristen!), I'd like to get back to the topic: Panda. It is clear to me that my situation could be improved as Kristen has suggested above, but it is also clear that if so, that's nothing to do with Panda, isn't it? That's just about "content consolidation" and "topical relevance".

Then, back to my original discussion topic, what about the classical Panda issues such as "thin content", or "duplicate content"? As I wrote above, my competitor has plenty of that kind of content, but doesn't seem to have been touched by Panda whatsoever. So... what's the deal with Panda then? And in my particular niche, should I worry more about "topical relevance" and keep optimizing my site under other aspects (usability, user intent, etc), and stop worrying to much about thin and duplicate content?

If you were me, what would you do considering my competitor's evidence? How many other site owners like myself have become "paranoid" about Panda (wasting tons of time, resources and money) and have instead lost focus on other (probably more important!) issues such as topical relevance, content organization, usability, user intent, etc.

More thoughts on that?

This is a very good answer, thank you Kristen. The more I look at the "site structure" of my competitor compared to ours, the more I realize we need to work on that.

I have also started to think about the so called "siloing technique" Bruce Clay introduced a few years ago, and it looks like 8notes.com has done a very good job to follow that kind of concept, whereas we are probably "spreading" too much of our juice around thousands of different pages and categories... what are your thoughts on that?

Just a thought about the fact I have put those pages to be no indexed in the robots.txt file: If you look at those pages, you see they are generated dynamically from our internal search engine. And as you can see, you can filter results by clicking the filters on the left side of the page... which is a great thing for users, but can be problematic for search engines. Right? So.. that's why I decided to simply no-robot those pages, to avoid any possible indexing and crawling issues. So... how would you suggest tackling that problem? My first idea would be to create "static pages" for those dynamic pages linked from the category pages, and then block via no-robot the links of the filters on the left side... do you have any different ideas?

Thank you again for your help! Super-appreciated!