Are HTML Pages With Useful Images and No Text Thin Content?

[Pjman]

In the post-Panda world are HTML pages that contain only images considered thin content? Even if most people come to my site just for those images and they all find them very valuable.

People are searching for that exact content and I get a great deal of praise on them. But can a machine based algorithm tell the difference?

Just wondering whether to noindex those pages or not?

[HuskyPup]

Just wondering whether to noindex those pages or not?

I haven't and all are still ranking extremely well however it is very noticeable that my new site with even better images and plenty of widget text are now beginning to do even better and even demoting some of my 12+ year old images and pages.

FWIW I am not even considering updating my evergreen sites, I am simply building newer sites under new domain names, some company names, some keyword names.

[azn romeo 4u]

I run sorta of an image site, but not exactly. Basically most of the pages just displays that links to another page with where to download the image and how to add it into various websites.

Make sure that to always use the title and alt html attributes on links and images. And that's all I got. LOL.

[piatkow]

I have image pages that rank very well for some long tail queries. You need some surrounding text and, as stated above, title and alt attributes. A couple of lines of descriptive text can be a great boost of course. I was looking at site stats just now and noticed one page in my photo gallery coming at number 2 for a search on the subject (a photo of a fairly obscure musician)

They are unlikely to do as well for major keywords and you are likely to loose "link juice" as, typically, image pages end up being categorised into folders with fewer direct links from the home page.

[netmeg]

I have a few pages like that, but they're a pretty small percentage of the total URLs on the site. If you have plenty of other rich content, it probably won't hurt to have them. If you don't, well then maybe.

[Pjman]

Thanks guys for the great advice.

It looks like the consensus is that as long as a small percentage of your site is image based HTML and you add a title and alt tag, no need to noindex it.

If this is a great deal of your site, noindex it.