2 replies to this topic

[Ehli]

Hello - just registered; I left an introduction post in the pub.

Currently my website has a small gallery of 12 pictures per subject. I designed the structure to be:

CODE

subject.html - having (besides all the textual content) 12 thumbnails in the form:
href: subject/gallery/
alt: "Image #n of Subject"
src: /images/gallery/subject/image-#n-small.jpg

subject/gallery/ - having a h1 "Images of Subject" as only text and 12 medium sized images in the form:
href: subject/gallery/#n
alt: "Image #n of Subject"
src: /images/gallery/subject/image-#n-medium.jpg
rel: nofollow

subject/gallery/#n - having 1 large sized image and a h1 "Image #n of Subject"
These all contain canonical link to their respective subject/gallery/ and include a robots noindex,follow meta

So far this seems to work and google webmaster tools does not tag it as duplicate content after I added the canonical links. However I'm not happy about having the generated alt tags. The only gallery advice I could find state the alt tags and texts around the images should be meaninful, but that's the whole problem of having several pictures of the same subject.

Sure, I could start being very creative and desribe the position of the subject in every alt tag, but, besides it being of no help to the user, would be pretty silly and time intensive doing that for 500 subjects times 12 images.

Any suggestions or tips are welcome!

[qwerty]

Well, from one perspective, the fact that you're using rel="canonical" means that you don't need to do anything to differentiate those pages, because you're actively telling the search engines that the gallery page matters and the rest don't. You recognize that they don't stand on their own and you're fine with the search engines ignoring them. You could take it one step further and instead of creating pages for the large images, you could just use some AJAX lightbox and have the large images just pop up over the gallery page.

On the other hand, if you feel that there's something to say about each of the individual images (something more than "image n of x"), not just in its alt attribute but on the page, then you can provide something of value to the people looking at the page by adding some text. If you do that, you should lose the rel="canonical" because each of those pages is going to stand on its own.

[Ehli]

Well, from one perspective, the fact that you're using rel="canonical" means that you don't need to do anything to differentiate those pages, because you're actively telling the search engines that the gallery page matters and the rest don't. You recognize that they don't stand on their own and you're fine with the search engines ignoring them. You could take it one step further and instead of creating pages for the large images, you could just use some AJAX lightbox and have the large images just pop up over the gallery page.

On the other hand, if you feel that there's something to say about each of the individual images (something more than "image n of x"), not just in its alt attribute but on the page, then you can provide something of value to the people looking at the page by adding some text. If you do that, you should lose the rel="canonical" because each of those pages is going to stand on its own.

Thank you for the input. Perhaps I should write some text to the galleries of subjects I value highly, both as a test and saving time having to copywrite 500 paragraphs.

An important enough percentage of visitors started to enter via the medium sized gallery, after adding a link directing them back to the main subject page. So replacing the medium sized gallery with a lightbox seems to be unwise.

Replacing the large one is an idea, as its set to noindex, follow anyways - but I have a fair share of external sites using these images. Oddly enough I get credit from Google for these images, even when they don't link to me and the image resides in a noindex page.. Then again how many users will manually type in my address after seeing it rendered in the image - sadly I can't track this, as it would result as a type-in.

Is there any way to let Google know a larger version of an image is available? I'm under the impression Google is very poor in handling javascript. Perhaps create links to the bigger versions with javascript catching the onclick instead?