Maintaining Google Image Rankings - Post Panda

[jinxed]

I would like to hear some opinions from others about the best strategy to go ahead with in regards to one of my websites.

I have a site that was hit by Panda 2.1, where a significant portion of the traffic was slashed. In my honest assessment, I can see why it was deemed worthy of a Panda slap due to a large amount of the content being outdated and many pages that were added ‘just to rank for those keywords’.

The website does however have many pages that are of high quality and do still rank well.

My dilemma is that a lot of the ‘low quality’ pages do still receive significant traffic – 90% being from Google Images. The photos on these pages are high quality, and are there (in my opinion) on merit.

In a bid to higher my ‘Panda Ranking’, I would like to remove these pages but also preserve my image rankings as these pages do still provide decent revenue (and people do find the images valuable).

What’s the solution? Create a gallery and scrap the pages? Has anyone done this with any success? I'm interested to hear people's thoughts.

NB This is not an ‘I’ve been Pandalised and I don’t know why’ thread! I get why.

[Robert Charlton]

My dilemma is that a lot of the ‘low quality’ pages do still receive significant traffic – 90% being from Google Images. The photos on these pages are high quality, and are there (in my opinion) on merit.

I'm not exactly understanding your concern. Are you saying that because they're image pages, they have shallow content and therefore must be bad for Panda? Or is it that they have too many ads?

Seems to me that if those images are ranking in Image Search, that's a sign that Google likes at least something about those pages.

Is this a structural problem, that you can't remove some image pages without removing all of them? Or that you can't reduce your ads without losing income, at least from those pages? Not sure what the situation is.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Image traffic vs web traffic, don't assume any one page can get both. I've seen many examples of pages that rank well for one but not the other that suddenly switch and do the exact opposite.

Adding images to pages that get little if any web traffic is a good approach but if a page already gets decent web traffic however I suggest not adding new images. Yes, you can get traffic from both, but trust me when I say that one can often cancel the other out.

[Leosghost]

If each image is a large one and on it's own page ? then make another page ( B ) for each ..But on the new page put all the textual content that you want for "depth content" plus a thumbnail that links to the larger image page ( A )..

Incorporate the new ones into your nav in parallel..not in place of the larger image pages..gradually reduce the textual content on the ( A ) pages ..you should eventually rank the As for images ..and the Bs for content..just be careful to not use dupe text from the As when you build the Bs.

[jinxed]

I'm not exactly understanding your concern. Are you saying that because they're image pages, they have shallow content and therefore must be bad for Panda? Or is it that they have too many ads?

Sorry, I'm not sure I explained the page setup very well.

These pages all have 300-400+ words of textual content, which I would describe as shallow. When created, the pages were intended for the traditional 'web search' - and did rank well. The images were there to compliment the textual content, so basically an addition to the original pages.

Post-Panda - the web search for these pages tanked, yet the image searches held (possibly improved).

So basically, its apparent Goog dislikes the textual content (valid), yet likes the image content (valid). I therefore want to keep the images ranking well but at the same time remove the offending text.

To go into even more specifics... the pages discuss types of 'products' - yet do not actually sell the products. I believe there has been some recent discussions about the SERPS categorising these pages to a greater degree i.e. more divide between informational and transactional keyphrases, which does make sense.

Thank you for the input so far, it's been helpful.

I think the solution may be to 301 the existing pages to new dedicated 'image pages' in more of a gallery format - with the addition of new relevant/useful text.

[HuskyPup]

Post-Panda - the web search for these pages tanked, yet the image searches held (possibly improved).

I had precisely the same thing happen with Panda 2.1 with two Coppermine image galleries, my custom-built galleries were not touched.

The Coppermine galleries only have the widget product name text on them, they are pureply meant as reference product images, nothing else.

I've come to two conclusions:

1. The Panda decided that the non-existing descriptions were too thin, obviously, however the images were fine.

2. There was also an algo/system change at the same time pushing other galleries ahead of me, many with my images I might add, and this change preferred these images being referred to in a different way.

I rebuilt one of those databases nearly two weeks ago and whereas I had been a fluctuating top 5 for years for the two most important keywords and had been dropped slowly since 2.1 to the 4th page, following the rebuild I am now back to 12th therefore it'll be interesting to see just how far back up they go.