Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Readers Digest version: We went from over 4000 images indexed to next to nothing. We now have over 6000 original images and about 390-400 of those are indexed depending on the day, datacenter and wind direction.
I'd like to stress that this is NOT an MFA site. We have tons of other coverage, but the 6,000+ images I'm talking about are red carpet and event photos taken by our staff at <major events>. These are not photos that are either licensed, or sadly, stolen from other sites. It's not a paparazzi site. We're talking press passes, hours of waiting, designated press areas, etc. 100% original to us.
I imagine that one reason the images might have gone supplemental is due to the fact that there are only so many ways to skin a cat. How many ways can you label 5 photos of <the same person at the same event>?
Just wondering what tips you might have to rehabilitate these images...would creating trivia for each photo relevant to the subject(s) work to add more text content?....
Would that help?
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 12:52 am (utc) on Jan. 4, 2008]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
Google indexes text, and the image descriptions therefore need to be substantial enough, and to contain enough distinct content, that they are not seen as dupes of each other.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 1:07 am (utc) on Jan. 4, 2008]
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 2:12 am (utc) on Jan. 4, 2008]
...the same person at the same event...
It occurs to me that your photo page titles in a given group might be very similar, if not identical, to each other. You definitely need to introduce some variation into these, as well as in the onpage text.
Also, make sure you have a well-organized hierarchy of text links with useful and varied anchors, and with good PageRank distribution. Some album software that I've seen doesn't link equally to individual photo pages. Sometimes you get a link to the first shot, and then each subsequent shot in a group receives a "next" link from the shot that precedes it. Or else, all subsequent pages only have numbers as anchor text. Neither arrangement is ideal if you want all of your photo pages indexed.
Getting variation into that anchor text, btw, is going to be challenging.
# firstperson
# secondperson and thirdperson
# secondperson and thirdperson
# thirdperson
A bit hard to add much difference to the lists...except for perhaps adding photo numbers like:
# Photo 1: firstperson
# Photo 2: secondperson and thirdperson
# Photo 3: secondperson and thirdperson
# Photo 4: thirdperson
Not much of a change but the 2 and the 3 would add a bit o' a difference to the anchor text.
The only referrers that I see for image search results do not give the search arguements which is an absolute pain.
Would it make sense to make the lists of photos noindex,follow and the just the photo pages indexable?
Would it make sense to make the lists of photos noindex,follow and the just the photo pages indexable?
No... I think doing this would in fact hurt you.
I also realize that our main gallery page, which links to the various events, has over 400 links...time to break that sucker down by year!
Sounds like your lists of photos aren't well organized. You might consider organizing them in several ways, by subject, by year, by event, etc... or at least into subcategories... and then optimizing these topical list pages, which are in effect small site maps.
Re optimizing site maps, take a look at this discussion...
When is a door not a door?
When it's ajar. But seriously - about doorway pages...
[webmasterworld.com...]
Sounds like your lists of photos aren't well organized. You might consider organizing them in several ways, by subject, by year, by event, etc... or at least into subcategories... and then optimizing these topical list pages, which are in effect small site maps.
Actually, they've always been broken by events and sub events.
E.g. a one day event immediately linked to its gallery while a major multi-day event had pages for each of the multitude of photo-ops that took place each day.
The only problem is that my main entry to the gallery listed links to all the events and subevents, hence the 400+ links after 10 years of coverage.
Thursday night and Friday I did a major overhaul. The main page now links to the years, the years link to the events, the events link to the subevents. If a subevent has more than 60 photos, the listings are paged.
I think it should be much better now.
Also, knowing how far the average fan surfs around looking to get their fix, I realized the trivia idea didn't need to go on all 6000+ photos. As long as there's one photo per person at an event that is heavier in text, I don't think I'll need to do every single image. I'll get started on that soon.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:59 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2008]
My alt's have subject name ¦ event ¦ photographer name ¦ copyright notice
Is that way too much info for Google? Would the last two bits (photographer name and copyright) be adding far too much duplication? Should it just be:
subject name ¦ event
