Better to have replacement text or no text at all?

[realmaverick]

From an SEO perspective, Google SERPs in particular, would you consider it better to have no text on the page at all or php replacement text.

Take a website with galleries, that have user generated content. I run an art community and thus our website is very image centric.

It's very similar in many ways to Deviant Art. When you click a piece of art, other than the comments and sometimes a brief descriptions, there is very little text on the page.

On these pages, I really don't know whether its best to generate an introduction sentence or just leave it blank.

Suggestions are most welcomed.

Thanks a lot.

[tedster]

Without seeing the specific case, I'd say that having even a minimal bit of introductory text content that you create and control is a good idea.

That said, there can certainly be pages that don't make a good search landing page no matter what - so going through any effort at all could be a waste of resources.

[Zivush]

Consider adding text to the alt description tag of the page in case you don't see any value of giving that brief description to the visitors.
A bit more than what you already give to the alt of the image itself.

[Planet13]

Hi there, realmaverick:

This is kind of a different suggestion, but maybe it is worth thinking about.

How about no-indexing much of the image pages that have little to no content?

I think that it would be best to try and rank "category" or "artist" pages, so maybe you can set these up (if they don't exist already) and the individual artwork pages would be linked from these pages.

I apologize that without being familiar with the layout, it is a little hard to make suggestions. But if it is similar to some of the galleries I have seen, they tend to rely too much on INTERNAL search and not enough on categories (such as genres, artists, media, gender, country-regional, subject matter, etc.,)

Instead, I think your focus might be best by creating high value category pages (assuming you don't have them already). I think your time is best spent "curating" the collection.

so I think creating detailed "category" pages for those differences might be the way to go.

Hope this helps.

(I am kind of using a parallel to my eCommerce site that might have LOTS of different widgets with little distinguishing text - except for maybe size or model number - for each individual widget. It is much easier to rank a brand page, such as Brand X Widgets, than it is to get the individual widget pages to rank).