Title recommendations for image galleries

[ianevans]

Our site has huge galleries of original red carpet images taken by our staff.

I'd like some suggestions on the best way to structure the title tags for Google to increase searchability and distinctiveness.

A while back, we added the photo number to avoid duplicate titles if we had, say, five photos of the same star in a row. I'll use this site as an example so as not to break the TOS with any site recognizable content.

Okay, so let's say we have photos of Tedster at the Annual Webmasterworld Awards. The Title currently looks like this:

Photo 1 Tedster ¦ 15th Annual Webmasterworld Awards

Just looking at this, I'm assuming Tedster should probably go before Photo 1 and photo 1 should be last e.g.:

Tedster ¦ 15th Annual Webmasterworld Awards ¦ Photo 1

will that be distinct enough for Google from:

Tedster ¦ 15th Annual Webmasterworld Awards ¦ Photo 3

is having the distinct part at the end too far?

[tedster]

Having just one different character may well not be enough to have Google see this pages as unique - especially in the absence of a unique meta description. I'm assuming that's the case, since you didn't mention the description at all.

If the pages are low PR, all but one may well end up behind an "omitted results" link, unless they have a backlink from another site. However, I'd assume that these pages will link to each other in some fashion. So just one in the index may well be all you need to be findable through Google, as well as all you can hope for.

I'm not convinced that "prominence" is a factor in the title tag these days. I've seen a lot of data that indicates it may not be. However, having the differentiating word early on in the title can be helpful for your users.

[Receptional Andy]

It sounds to me like the problem is not so much how to structure the titles, but the lack of unique information to go in them. If the photos are largely identical, then there's no reason why they should all appear in results individually, and not much reason to be concerned if they don't (you could always exclude the extra copies if you were worried about it).

The ideal would be to have some descriptive text unique to the picture, e.g. "Mr Widget looking resplendent at the Widget Awards" and "Mr Widget blinking at the wrong moment at the Widget Awards".

[willybfriendly]

Captions help photos, from what I can tell.

<title>Tedster ¦ 15th Annual Webmasterworld Awards ¦ 20k Post award</title>

<img alt="Tedster gets whoopee cusion" src="" />
<p>Tedster receives a whoopee cushion in appreciation of a very impressive 20,000 posts on WebmasterWorld</p>

Now all those pages are different. Enough to rank? That might depend on the template used, since even a sentence of 100-200 characters might not be enough.

Of course, if you put several pictures/captions per page as thumbnails with links to a larger version, now the pages start losing thier sameness.

<title> Tedster ¦ 15th Annual Webmasterworld Awards</title>

<a href="images/photo1.jpg"><img alt="Tedster gets whoopee cusion" src="" /></a>

<p>Tedster receives a whoopee cushion in appreciation of a very impressive 20,000 posts on WebmasterWorld</p>

<a href="images/photo2/jpg"><img alt="Brett conrgratulates Tedster" src="" /></a>

<p>Tedster receives firm handshake and pat on the back from Brett</p>

etc...

[ianevans]

Andy,

I've thought about the unique text issue before and have already started working on trivia for each photo e.g. Andy was at the awards for his role in "The Alt Tag" while the next photo might mention some other career highlight...

I guess the other thought you mentioned might work too. If I have three photos of Tedster in a row, just have the 2nd and 3rd have noindex meta tags...

[ichthyous]

I am having the same type of problem with my photo gallery site. The photos are organized into main categories (albums), and some albums have sub-albums, and a few have sub-sub albums. In addition to the obvious problem with burying individual images that many levels deep, the gallery app doesn't allow for unique page titles or descriptions for each page of the album. Google Webmaster Tools has started reporting thousands of duplicate pages recently because of this.

For instance the album dealing with architectural images has 20 pages, each page with 9 image thumbnails which link to full size images. All 20 album pages have the exact same title, metas, and on-page description. I have recommended many many times that the gallery app programmers rectify this by at least adding "Page #X" to the end of the page titles, and by limiting the on-page description to just the first album page. Unfortunately it's not high-priority for them since most of their users are not professionals and could care less about how well their sites are indexed.

My question is..do ALL of the pages listed as dupe content in GWT get dropped from the index, or is at least one kept?

[piney]

If you "noindex" the images that are similar, wouldn't that also prevent them from appearing in Google Images? I would presume you wouldn't want to lose that traffic.

Another way to differentiate is to have the file sizes of the images vary. I don't know how much that helps for the general index, but it does affect which comes up first in Google Images (the pages with the larger images come up ahead of the smaller images).

If you have a huge number of images, this might be too cumbersome... I label the best of the group with the most general file name, ie "shape", the next one less general, "round shape," then "green round shape" and so on. It isn't enough to keep the pages from being deemed supplemental, though. It's just a helpful naming system to make the images be found on various searches when people are using Google Images.

For the supplemental issue, lately I rely on Google Webmaster Tools' list of pages with meta descriptions that are too short. Lengthening the descriptions and/or adding general content that supports what the image is about seems to do the trick.

[Receptional Andy]

do ALL of the pages listed as dupe content in GWT get dropped from the index, or is at least one kept?

Webmaster Tools is one source of data: it's useful, but is not the authoritative source of data on search results: Google SERPs are. Typically, none of the pages listed are dropped from the index.

[ichthyous]

I have changed the titles of the category pages on my site by adding the page number to the end...i.e. "Category X - Page X". Is this usually enough to get google to drop the pages from dupe titles status?