I have a site that is heavy on images with many pages having an image but maybe a sentence description. I don't want google to penalise me with some panda update due to thin content - the images/photos are there primarily to spread the word and encourage social sharing - I was wondering is it enough to make such pages nofollow to ward off panda or should i also make them noindex?
netmeg
3:11 pm on Feb 3, 2014 (gmt 0)
Do you have pages that aren't thin on the site, or is the whole site like this?
7_Driver
3:21 pm on Feb 3, 2014 (gmt 0)
NoIndex might be a sensible precaution - especially if Google doesn't send much traffic to these pages.
NoFollow won't help you with Panda.
NoIndex will make google perceive your site as smaller though - which isn't so good.
Can't guarantee NoIndex is protective against Panda - I've done extensive NoIndexing as part of a Panda recovery, which hasn't helped (yet) - although others report success - so signals (as ever) are mixed.
luckystrike
12:36 am on Feb 4, 2014 (gmt 0)
'Do you have pages that aren't thin on the site, or is the whole site like this?'
No its a separate section where I post images and embedded youtube videos...my fear is that if i grow it too much it will backfire.
netmeg
2:34 am on Feb 4, 2014 (gmt 0)
Google's all about percentages and signals, so you probably want to keep your thin content in check. (And no, there's no hard and fast numbers on that, but me, I try to keep it at least 2 to 1 on in depth vs thin)
lucy24
3:59 am on Feb 4, 2014 (gmt 0)
I was wondering is it enough to make such pages nofollow to ward off panda or should i also make them noindex?
Isn't that backward?
I know exactly what you're describing btw. I had one batch of image-oriented pages that were thin to the point of emaciation: header, picture, navigation footer, no other text at all. All were flagged "noindex". (In the past tense because I recently said the ### with it and did some wholesale deleting.)
In one sense it may be academic because a page with next-to-no text is not likely to come up in searches. But I worried about the huge disproportion between thin pages and fat pages. I don't have many middle-sized pages.
