freejung - 10:33 pm on Jan 21, 2011 (gmt 0)

Most of my traffic and earnings come from photo gallery pages.

Yeah, me too, but I'm not so worried about it and here's why:

Notice the name of the new algo Matt refers to:

we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier

It's a classifier, not just a spam-fighter as such. It divides documents into categories. We pretty much figured that out, we've had several discussions about it.

One of the categories is presumably "spam." I bet "photo gallery" is another one. If your site really has photo galleries with decent quality images, it is probably classified as a photo gallery and is therefore expected to follow a certain pattern -- i.e. lots of images, not much text, and what text there is mostly takes the form of titles and captions.

Presumably metrics other than quantity and quality of text content would be applied to a photo gallery to determine relevance. There's only so much you can reasonably say about a picture -- they say a picture's worth a thousand words, but I usually find that a hundred is pushing it without getting boring and repetitious. So most photo galleries are pretty thin on text content. Google would expect them to be that way, and apply different standards.

I wonder what the other categories might be?