jpg catalog pages

pr2 because google thinks too much duplication?

[grayhair]

One of my websites is for a manufacturer. The best way to show their product is to post the pages of their print catalogs. The catalogs are too complicated to reproduce in html so I have reproduced each page as a jpg. (Previously the pages were pdf files but people did not like pdfs.)

Unfortunately, doing the pages of the catalogs this way makes the 140 pages appear to be very similar except for page title, description, keywords and the jpg alt text. There are a lot of navigation links that are the same on each page. So I assume that is why they are just a PR2 (Home page is PR4). The pages do show up in searches for relevant keywords.

How much alt text per jpg/gif does Google recognize? Is there an another way I can do this?

thanks

[Macguru]

It is normal that PageRank decreases going further down in some site's hierachy.

The fact that pages do show up in searches for relevant keywords is all that matters.

[mmurdock]

The PR2 rating you see in the toolbar is probably just a guess based upon the home page pr4. A true pr would only result when you have outside sites linking to inside pages. Don't worry about the apparant PR slip between the home page and the inside page UNLESS you actually have incoming links to these inside pages.

If G has indexed these pages then you are doing good so far.. The next step is to optimize these pages for keywords that get you better SERP results for the products on the pages. One way to do this is to use the ALT tag for the image. Someone smarter than me will have to answer how much text in an ALT tag G uses. A better way would be to add the text below the image in the page. Using style sheets you could keep the text from being too obtrusive (but don't hide it altogether using too small a font or white on white). This will give G some real text to index.

Best of luck.

-- Mike

[heini]

>A true pr would only result when you have outside sites linking to inside pages

That's not correct. PR gets passed between all pages in a site. In this case, which is the typical setup, the index page receives most PR from external links and passes that on to the internal pages.

Duplication issues are normally not related to PR. If you get penalized for duplication you don't have your pages with a PR2 in the index.
Also, PR2 for product pages is normally totally OK. If you do a solid onpage optimization and work good with linktext you should be fine.
Ranking is what counts, forget PR.

[grayhair]

thanks for the info - guess I shouldn't worry too much about it - was concerned mostly because backlinks of internal website pages aren't showing up for the home page (all pages within web are interconnected)

[BigDave]

PR2 sounds about right if you have 140 product pages and only have a PR4 on your home page.

Like the others said. it's the hits and sales that count, not the PR. If PR2 is "enough" to get you the good rankings, then you are doing fine.