SEO Impact: Site Structure - Photos

[animalstyle]

I am looking to make Looking for guidance here from an SEO perspective.

Current structure:

• Business page (/businesses/business-name/) -(links to)-> Various Photos of the Business (/photos/photo-name/)
• Each Photo Page -(links to)-> Other photos + Back to the business.
• There is also a /photo/ section that links to each photo page individually.

The photo pages have little content - the image, a caption, thumbnails of other photos with links, a link to the business, and 2-3 adsense blocks.

I am moving these photos to an on-page gallery when someone is browsing the business profile. Its a better user experience. The reason I initially decided to have each photo live on it's own is that it increased my ad revenue. Now the ads cannibalize my revenue and I want to keep them on the business page.

Check my thinking:

• Move all the photos to on-page display, removing the links to individual pages.
• Remove all the individual pages.
• Mass 301 all /photos/photo-name/ to /photos/

There are a few hundred photos. The thought to 301 each photo page to the appropriate business crossed my mind. It would just be SO many redirects. Would it be wise to do that?

My thinking is these thin-ad heavy pages couldn't be doing much for me and switching this won't hurt my rankings, but maybe im overlooking something.

 

[lion1978]

My thinking is these thin-ad heavy pages couldn't be doing much for me and switching this won't hurt my rankings

spot on and since you'll be creating a better user experiance you might just recieve a little more google love.

The thought to 301 each photo page to the appropriate business crossed my mind

It may be a bit of pain in the ass to do this ammount of work, but if I was ni your shoes I'd do it. It may not have a hughe impact but it will still have a litle and put you one step ahead of those who are lazy (most people are when it comes to these tasks).

 

[animalstyle]

@lion1978 - thank you!

For 301ing each individual image. OK np I can do that with a little excel magic fairly easily - down the line though do you think its good to eventually pull those 301's? At a certain point isn't it excessive to have hundreds and hundreds of 301's?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I don't think it's excessive to have 100's or 1000's of redirects. It's your site, do what you want.

Unless those individual image pages have backlinks, they aren't going to provide much of anything. They will eventually be deindexed as well, so without links or indexing you're not saving any juice and you're creating 301's that will never be traveled. This consideration could save you some time, where you could cherry pick certain pages to 301 and abandon the rest.

The real benefit is going to be getting rid of these pages, which undoubtedly aren't going to rank for anything yet at the end of the line are hoarding a ton of your page rank juice. Getting rid of them isn't "sculpting in a bad way", but in your case, it's sculpting in a good way. Plus, how many thin pages that provide no meaningful usage are you about to drop from your site? I'm sure there's a percentage based variable (and threshold) that is used in the Panda filter. My guess is you'll get a lot of benefit by getting rid of these page rank traps and boosting your percentage of quality pages domain-wide.

 

[lion1978]

yw. @animalstyle
I could be a goud Idea to pull them sometime down the line sure, I guess it can look a little spammy, but on the other hand it's internal links so I wouldn't pull them unless I had a strong suspicion that it was affecting my ranking in a negative way, and I really dont see that happening since you are simply telling google that you have moved content from one place to another.